“It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.”
–Satchel Paige
What is the world’s tallest mountain? Did you say Mount Everest? You’re wrong. The answer is Mauna Kea and, as measured from its base to its summit, it is 33,465 feet high—or 4,436 feet taller than Mount Everest.
Mauna Kea’s distinguishing characteristic is that three-fourths of the mountain lies under water. Mount Everest remains the highest mountain as measured from sea level to summit, but Mauna Kea is the tallest as measured from the bottom its base to its top.
Now, you may cry foul and argue that the question was nothing more than a linguistic trick. I’d counter that both the question and the answer serve as a useful metaphor for the concept of unlearning, which I define as follows:
unlearn; v. [the act of unlearning; verbal n, to unlearn]
1. the act of releasing old knowledge.
2. to see the world not as one would like to see it, but as it really is.
3. to be un-uninformed.
4. to acquire wisdom either by replacing old information that has been supplanted by new knowledge or by relinquishing known falsehoods.
Unlearning is a critical skill, especially in today’s world of rapid and accelerating change. To understand why, consider this: scientific and technical knowledge is now doubling every 7 years.
This may sound a tad astounding until one considers that there are now 6 billion-plus people populating the planet and 90 percent of the scientists ever to roam the planet are still alive; and these scientists and their growing legions of students are adding, at a prodigious rate, new knowledge in fields as varied as biotechnology, chemistry, genomics, material science, nanotechnology, neuroscience, robotics and quantum physics.
Aided in their quest, the world’s researchers and entrepreneurs are now armed with a bevy of sophisticated new tools which are doing everything from probing and plumbing sub-atomic particles inside the human body to visualizing the outer expanses of the universe. Further accelerating matters, these discoveries are now being enhanced with the aid of wickedly powerful supercomputers and then shared over wireless and fiber optic connections in a proverbial blink of an eye with fellow researchers on the other side of the globe—and all points in-between.
One often overlooked implication of this growing tsunami of scientific knowledge is that as impressive as our knowledge base is today it will represent just half of what we will know in just seven short years. (Remember knowledge is doubling every 7 years). In less than a decade-and-a-half’s time, it’ll represent a mere 25 percent.
To get a glimpse of the near future, it helps to go back in time two doublings (or 14 years) and consider how advances in just two fields—semiconductors and fiber optic bandwidth—enabled the creation of the cellphone and Internet and how those devices, in turn, have transformed society. Consider next that society will experience an amount of change comparable to the past 14 years in just the next 7 years.
If you think of future knowledge as an iceberg that portion of the iceberg which lies above the water can be thought of as representing existing knowledge. That which resides below the water is the equivalent of future knowledge. And, just as the hidden part of Mauna Kea causes many people to overlook the fact that it is the tallest mountain in the world, future knowledge will also surprise a great many people. Unless, that is, they are open to unlearning.
Unlearning, unfortunately, is neither a natural skill nor is it an easy one to acquire, and it is here that the metaphor to an iceberg is particularly apt. Imagine you are the captain of a ship entering waters conducive to the creation of icebergs; to survive it is important to beware not only of the presence of the growing number of icebergs, you must also understand that—by an order of magnitude of two— the far greater threats are the submerged portions of those iceberg which can’t yet be seen.
Just as a modest-sized iceberg sank the “unsinkable” Titanic, the growing number of future knowledge “icebergs” (e.g. biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, the semantic web, RFID, quantum physics, etc.) may similarly take down the most “unsinkable” of industries.
To avoid this fate, it’ll be necessary to change course quickly and often, and unlearning is an essential skill every leader and organization must possess in order to safely navigate the future. In fact, as this unlearning lesson suggests, you must either unlearn or die.
