Unlearning as an integral part of Knowledge Management: The nature and

visualizations of the process.

Information and knowledge are sacred words for information professionals. The idea of
deliberate losing information or knowledge may seem counterintuitive to many of us. When we
consider knowledge, we first of all focus on such creative and positive processes as knowledge
discovery, construction, sharing, transfer, application, recycling, etc. We often skip the
somewhat negative process of deliberate loss of knowledge. Some managers would say that we
do not need to focus on the latter because the nature of human cognition takes care of it. We need
to make efforts to learn, to memorize, while forgetting seems to be effortless. It just happens. But
is it true? Is it really easy? If we talk about occasional cases of forgetting names, numbers, to-do
list entries, and the like, the answer is yes. But if we consider deliberate forgetting as an integral
part of organizational and personal learning, the answer is not that straightforward.
All types of knowledge, many components of organizational culture, and some
competencies can become outdated. In such cases, the employees may get stuck with an ill-
structured mixture of advanced and obsolete knowledge, which may constitute a serious problem
for organizations. Bedford warns that “outdated or invalidated knowledge will become part of
the culture and can significantly inhibit any incentives to create or share new knowledge.
Unlearning or discarding outdated knowledge, routines and beliefs incentivizes organisations to
create, learn and acquire new ideas” (Bedford 2014/2015, 7). Wong, Shek, and Lam maintain
that “organizations rarely learn in a manner that conflicts with their beliefs”, and that
organizational unlearning, “as a process of removing obsolete beliefs and routines”, becomes an
important precondition of organizational learning (Wong et al. 2012, 1202). Hislop states that
“organizations need to get the balance right between retaining, protecting, and developing
knowledge that is useful and important, while simultaneously being able to discard, forget,
unlearn, or give up knowledge which has become outdated and of limited contemporary use”
(Hislop 2013, 124).
Learning or knowledge acquisition/creation/discovery does not mean simply adding more
information to our mental “databases”. That would make us simply better informed but not more
knowledgeable. We need to put new information into the context of our existing knowledge base,
check it against our pre-existing cognitive constructs, and either (1) find the right place for the
new piece of information within this structure, (2) discard the information as inadequate/wrong,
or (3) adjust our knowledge state in order to make sense of the new information, and start
thinking “out of the box”. The latter would require letting some knowledge go, and it is crucial to
understand the place of this process in the big picture of organizational and personal knowledge
management. It is especially important in regard to “wicked” problems the society is facing,
which require interdisciplinary, interprofessional, intercultural, and international approach. The
ability to unlearn, to questions and give up some knowledge patterns in order to establish a
common ground is especially important in teams whose members bring to the table not only a
variety of expertise and backgrounds but various disciplinary and professional biases, as well.
Some relearning may be necessary to foster healthy group dynamics in teams working on
projects calling for contributions from more than one discipline, as well as in interdisciplinary
fields of study, including Library and Information Science (Bedford, 2014/2015).
There are several terms that are beings used in literature to denote the idea of discarding
obsolete knowledge. Different authors use different metaphors, all of them employ some degree
of anthropomorphisation: deliberate or voluntary forgetting, deliberate loss of knowledge,
organizational forgetting, etc. Unlearning seems to be the most popular term, which may reflect
the high level of popularity of the concept of learning organizations and organizational learning.
The term “unlearning” is not new. It was defined by Hedberg in 1981 as a process of “emptying
previous information or knowledge” (Wong et al. 2012, 1204). Becker conceptualizes unlearning
as a “process by which individuals and organizations acknowledge and release prior learning in
order to accommodate new information and behaviors” (Becker 2005, 661). The emphasis on
the accommodating new information and behaviours is especially important, because unlearning
should be always followed by relearning. Zhao, Lu, and Wang (2013) argue that “in order to
achieve the dynamic knowledge management, organisations should pay more attention to the
synergies of organisational unlearning and organisational relearning on knowledge management
(Zhao et al. 2013, 903).
Review of the literature on the topic of unlearning shows that most organizations are not
comfortable with the process. Many knowledge managers have very vague ideas about their
options in regard to obsolete knowledge. It is easy to suggest “releasing prior learning”, but it is
very difficult to actually do that. Of course, we can always remove dated explicit knowledge
from organizational knowledge storages, but tacit knowledge is much more difficult to deal with.
Hislop writes that “research suggests that even the experience of failure in organizations rarely
results in the adequacy of existing knowledge/value/ideas/practices being reflected upon and that
consequently few organizations are systematically able to un/learn from failure” (Hislop 203,
122).
It is no wonder that managers find it very difficult to help their employees unlearn.
Unlearning is a highly dynamic and complex process. It includes several sub-processes that can
take place simultaneously or consequently. Researchers think that unlearning can precede
learning or happen at the same time (Hislop, 2013). This is why it is extremely difficult to
visualize, to integrate the process of forgetting into knowledge management cycle models. Very
few of them focus on the process of giving up knowledge. The paper illustrates this point
analyzing several visual representations of knowledge processing in organizations. For example,
Bukowitz and Williams include the process of knowledge divestment in their model, but they do
not specify the underlying mechanisms (Dalkir, 2005; Evans et al. 2014). The stages like
knowledge refinement in the Meyer & Zack’s cycle and knowledge update in Dalkir’s model
(Dalkir 2005) imply a process of letting go some dated knowledge but the authors do not explain
how it would work in a real organization. Nevertheless, these models offer useful visual
frameworks for knowledge workers and knowledge managers.
 The processes of unlearning and forgetting cannot be separated from the processes of
learning and memorization. Akgun et al. emphasise the connection between organizational
unlearning and memory “…because unlearning has been conceptualized as memory eliminating,
and investigation of how memory is formed and manifested could help in understanding and
operationalising unlearning in organizations” (Akgun et al. 2007, 797). This paper makes one
further step in the direction of the realm of cognitive science, which offers “two mechanisms that
can produce forgetting. One is decay of trace strength, and the other is interference from other
memories. There has been some speculation in psychology that what appears to be decay may
really reflect interference” (Anderson 2000, 211-212). Thus, interference may be an effective
and efficient means of replacing old memories/knowledge with the new ones. Psychologist think
that both explicit and implicit memory is vulnerable to interference (Eysenck 2004), which may
suggest that a well-organized process of relearning would automatically take care of unlearning,
even when employees are not completely aware of the fact that they possess a particular piece of
memory/tacit knowledge.
The analysis of the literature and several case studies, including examples of dramatic
changes in the world of modern librarianship, allows to assume that in knowledge-intensive
organizations, when learning is an integral part of knowledge workers’ daily activities, there is
no need to focus specifically on unlearning. When employees learn new things (new ideas,
procedures, policies, etc.), the obsolete fragments of individual knowledge are naturally replaced
by the current ones. Of course, “practice makes it perfect”, so the newly acquired knowledge
needs to be actively used on a regular basis in order to reinforce the process of relearning. This
applies first of all to individual knowledge. Replacing obsolete organizational knowledge is a
responsibility of knowledge managers. Ideally, a Chief Knowledge Officer would orchestrate the
process, starting with mapping and monitoring organizational knowledge base, identifying the
fragments of knowledge, both conceptual and procedural, that would require replacing through
relearning.
In conclusion, in regard to dealing with obsolete knowledge in organizations, the main
focus ought to be on relearning rather than unlearning. The efforts to discard obsolete knowledge
may be replaced by facilitating organizational learning in all its forms, building an environment
open to external knowledge, and creating a positive and dynamic atmosphere, which would make
intellectual stagnation impossible. Further research is needed to build a comprehensive model of
the process of organizational relearning.

References:

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