It’s
time to learn to unlearn
The very things that help us grow
our business today, can impede growth tomorrow. To grow better, we need to
develop the skill of recognizing when something has stopped working. We need to
learn to unlearn.
During the first frenzied days when
we were trying to get Atlassian off the ground, we had to take on as many
responsibilities as needed and acquire every bit of knowledge that goes along
with them. However, as we started scaling the business, this behavior quickly
became impossible to sustain.
So, how did Atlassian become more
effective without being chained to our desks all day?
We had to take
something away. Unlearn it to free up capacity for something new.
Businesses are rapidly transforming
and to stay relevant we have to unlearn. Just as operating models,
organizational designs, leadership styles and work schedules have to change
with the first 50 employees, it needs to continue evolving with the company’s
first 100, 1,000 and 10,000 employees. There is always room for improvement,
even when you’ve become the leader of an established company. Outdated ways of thinking and doing need to
be constantly discarded to make space for methods that lead to innovation and
growth.
This mindset shift can be
challenging, especially when we’re often surrounded by a “more is more”
culture.
Here’s how to get started.
Identify
At its
core, unlearning is the art of stopping patterns. We identified practices, rituals or behaviors that
would not be as valuable to us in the future as they were in the past. For
example, at Atlassian we unlearned our practice of using KPIs (key performance
indicators) and began using OKRs (objectives and key results).
When we had KPIs, we
were always arguing about micro outputs that weren’t doing anything to push us
forward. The old system was also too focused on individual performance, which
led to people caring less about the impact their actions had on the overall
success of the organization.
The fruitful conversations that we
did manage to have during that time were actually informal OKR conversations.
This led us to realize it was more useful to focus on the outcome of an
employee and team’s work than to measure output, which didn’t capture the most
important aspect: how the work
being done was affecting our business.
Other habits like delaying investment in training or
speaking in business BS may have worked before but they’re no
longer helping your company advance. There are some practices that will be
easier to remove than others. You may have rituals that still pay dividends but
it’s important to note that the dividend is reducing. You need the time and
space to try something new and evolve.
Understand
I was working with a distributed
engineering team when I first started working at Atlassian and when we went to
our quarterly offsite, it became obvious that there was a lot of
miscommunication. People were doing work that was no longer aligned with the team’s
goals while others were doing unnecessary, duplicative work. It would’ve been
easy to just blame the team members and move on but that wouldn’t have fixed
the problem.
I dug deeper to understand the root
cause by becoming cognizant of the team’s leadership styles and how they
worked. Then I actively sought to understand the effect it was having on the
team.
While doing this, I uncovered that
while the leadership team met often, the entire team only met once a quarter.
This meant that the leaders were aligned on what needed to be done but junior
team members weren’t.
Being a distributed
team with a poor communication rhythm also meant that people were saving up
things to say for months until they had a chance to speak with the entire team
at the offsite.
Once I figured that out, we worked
to mitigate the negatives so they stopped being barriers to the team’s success.
We mapped out the different stakeholders for projects in the team and connected
the people with similar responsibilities so that they could stay on the same
page. We also set up a regular communications cadence for the team to ensure
team members weren’t working in silos.
Experiment
As we sloughed off low-value
practices, we needed to experiment to find the new practices that would be best
for the business.
When we first tried to implement
new ways for our teams to improve their performance through the Atlassian Team Playbook, everyone saw the value of the
Playbook but insisted that their team was fine and didn’t need it.
So, we went back to the drawing
board and worked on how to get people to recognize that teams can always
improve. Even if you’re already on a high-performing team, there is room for
improvement.
Successful teams are
prone to falling into the trap of going back to the same good idea over and
over again, impeding their growth.
We decided to implement health monitors as a first step
for teams before they started using the Playbook. As the name signals, team
health monitors are the equivalent of getting a regular check-up, something
everyone needs to do to establish a baseline for their health.
Health monitors finally encouraged teams
to use the Playbook to improve their performance because it caused teams to pay
closer attention and identify their blind spots. Once they were able to see the
places for improvement, they were ready to put the Playbook to good use.
Implement
It’s all well and good to extol the
virtues of unlearning, but we made sure to practice what we preach. I make
myself do an unlearning exercise at the end of every quarter.
I assess the previous
quarter, breaking it down into four categories: what I loved, longed for,
loathed and learned.
The key is I don’t allow myself to
add in a “longed for” until I’ve taken out a “loathed.”
While doing this last quarter, I
found that I did less mentoring, something I love doing and pays dividends. On
the other hand, I loathed how many meetings I was in. Moreover, many of the
meetings didn’t seem to benefit from my attendance.
To address this, I deleted all my
meetings off of my calendar for the new quarter. I asked meeting organizers to
let me know if they needed me on the meetings and if so, what I was accountable
for in those meetings.
In the end, I cut the
number of meetings on my calendar by more than 50 percent and then was able to
reinvest that time into mentorship.
Unlearning is a useful tool for
everyone. For us to thrive, not just survive in the current market, we have to
keep an eye on the future and constantly evolve — that’s how we grow better.
Dom Price
https://thinkgrowth.org/its-time-to-learn-to-unlearn-437db380a7db
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