Connecting Organizational Silos: Taking Knowledge Flow Management to the Next Level with Social Media

UNLEARNING

One of the barriers that hinders flows of knowledge is prior knowledge and how deeply it is embedded into people’s thinking and behavior. It is best characterized by statements like the following:

• “But we have always done it that way.”
• “This will not work here.”
• “I know that this is the only way it will work.”

Some of those can be explained by not-invented-here (NIH) syndrome. If I haven’t been behind it, how can it be any good? Those types of statements reflect a certain type of attitude based on the urge to invent. Many people, especially technical experts, often think something is only of value if you developed it from start to end. Apart from the fact that this is almost impossible, as there is usually always something that you build upon, the notion of that being the honorable way can be difficult to get out of people’s head—even if you explain to them that the most valuable inventions were not created in isolation, but by smartly connecting the dots.

It is hard to change those types of attitudes. To accept new ways of thinking requires a certain amount of unlearning. This does not mean forgetting, but rather accepting that a certain piece of knowledge that we acquired or learned might not be as firm and accurate as we assumed. Surrounding facts and contexts change, new information is added to the picture, and that means those things we learned will need to be questioned. So, I would see unlearning as the process that happens when we reduce the firmness of our ...