Conscious unlearning, unconscious unlearning and forgetfulness – a plea to record our action learning experiences

The contribution of critical action learning to helping professionals unlearn familiar assumptions and existing responses has been established (Brook et al. 2016), as they work collaboratively to address challenging, ‘wicked’ social issues (Rittel and Webber 1973). The idea of unlearning attracts increasing attention, whether understood: as the relatively straightforward discarding or wiping out of old knowledge to make way for new (Hedberg 1981), as ‘a capacity which encourages individuals to be reflexive of themselves as socially constructed entities within relations of power’ (Pedler and Hsu 2014, 297) or as a process of ‘asking new questions that embrace the unknown’ (Antonacopoulou 2009, 428).

The argument in favour of unlearning at an individual level is that this is a necessary step for creation of new knowledge. The same has been said at a collective level, such that for organisations to develop new routines, or for organisational learning to occur, there must be unlearning in the sense of ‘organisational forgetting’ (Blackler, Crump, and McDonald 1999; Easterby-Smith et al. 2004) or ‘memory elimination’ (Cegarra-Navarro, Wensley, and Sanchez-Polo 2010). This is typically presented as desirable – a progressive cycle in which knowledge initially expands, then becomes outmoded, is discarded and replaced by new (Hedberg 1981). But is unlearning necessarily conscious and deliberate, or can it be unconscious, occurring without awareness? And when is unlearning the same as forgetting, in the sense of losing all memory? And organisationally, isn’t there a potential danger in such loss?

Prompted by a series of unrelated recent conversations, I raise these questions. The first was with a friend in Birmingham, England, about an archive project in one of the city’s suburbs. The project involves collecting together materials, reports and testimony of regeneration work undertaken in the area from the 1980s – a kind of living history. Recognising the fast-moving policy context for urban regeneration, as well as the decimation of public- and voluntary-sector organisations, and the increasingly transient nature of the latter in particular, her motive for initiating the project was to capture people’s experiences and lessons before documents get shredded and those involved disappeared – a conscious attempt to avoid forgetting.

My second conversation was with someone working on leadership development with the UK government, who talked of integrating action learning into the design. Not so many years ago, I worked on just such a programme – the UK Public Service Leadership Scheme and its successor, the Cross Sector Leadership Scheme; both programmes were championed by the Cabinet Office as a means both to develop leadership capability across all public bodies, and to develop, through the use of action inquiry, relationships and understanding that bridged across silos of the public sector (civil service, police, local government, health etc.) (Mead 2006). None of the individuals who were involved 10 years ago in commissioning or designing this initiative remains. They are retired or might have emigrated, passed away or moved on. But equally, knowledge about the programmes, its existence, origins, lessons, designs and experiences seems also to be lost to history, forgotten. Perhaps this unlearning was unconscious. Or in a rapidly changing political context, perhaps the choice to forget was conscious. Yet for my conversant, he agreed he would have valued being able to learn from that recent historical programme.

My third and final conversation was with a colleague in a business school which once pioneered an action-learning-based approach to post-graduate and undergraduate management education. After 25 years, this was disbanded on the grounds that it was too resource intensive. A change of deans a couple of years later produced the suggestion ‘it would be great to have some action learning in the business school’. By this stage, those with the years of experience and knowledge from the previous programmes had retired, emigrated, passed away or moved on. Without their knowledge being captured and recorded, the organisation could be said to have forgotten how to integrate action learning into its teaching – a combination of conscious and unconscious unlearning.

In contrast to the first conversation (where a record is being created to deliberately avoid forgetting), the latter two conversations illustrate how easily unlearning can occur, consciously or unconsciously. Much brilliant work is done with action learning, and there is much to offer the pressing challenges in our world, as the world seems to be ever-more complex, divided and vulnerable, and is desperately in need of innovative solutions. As displayed by the many contributions to the journal’s 2016 conference ‘Action Learning in Challenging Times: Questioning Insight, Challenging Practice’ (which is held at Ashridge Hult Business School), action learning is being used in creative ways to explore new questions, to produce fresh insights and to stimulate imaginative conversations that challenge traditional boundaries. Our plea is that these experiences and insights are recorded and shared; that action learning is researched and disseminated, so that valuable knowledge is not inadvertently unlearned or wisdom unconsciously forgotten.