What do you need to know in order to effect change? What do you need to learn to bring change about? These are questions that we ask as we set out to become agents of change. But we should also ask: what do I need to unlearn in order to prepare myself for a new and different way of thinking? Unlearning is important too. Unlearning is an essential part of the process of change.
Change and innovation both call for unlearning. To think anything new, and to see what could be new in things, one needs to find a way of unlearning what one already knows. Without unlearning, there is no chance of achieving a break and new beginning in your way of doing things. Think of experiences you’ve had of working towards change in whatever respect, and reaching a moment in which you saw that change was actually possible – more than possible, inevitable. In the sense of inevitablity – the realization that nothing you can say or do will make a difference, things will change – there is a new beginning.