The Importance of Unlearning

I’m now in Bochum, West Germany. I came here to do a CI/CD workshop with Docker, Kubernetes and Jenkins at a conference called DevOps Gathering. My workshop is scheduled for 1:30 pm. So I now have some blessed time to rest and reflect. I was actually contemplating attending one of the morning workshops. There is one by Victor Farcic of Cloudbees that looks especially interesting and also Niclas’s overview of Gtilab could be nice, as I haven’t found the time to dive deeper into Gitlab’s CI offering yet.

But then I decided not to go.

And this post is an attempt to unroll the thoughts that led me there.

Yesterday I saw Kelsey Hightower tweet this : 

And it stirred some kind of antagonism deep in my soul. I’ve always been an avid fan of continuous learning myself. For one — learning is a part of human nature, it is how we evolve. The moment we stop learning — we start dying (or reach nirvana, but that’s only for the chosen ones). And then — there’s the ever-changing elusive world around us that never ceases to surprise and catch us off-guard. So there’s always more to know.

In the last decade there’s been a lot of talk how you have to always be learning if you work in tech. I’ve even seen folks justifying their high salaries by that need to continuously update their skillset. As if this was a burden that you have to be compensated for. If you ask me — it’s more of a privilege. The only thing that justifies working with computers is the opportunity to play with them, learn how to make them perform new exciting tricks.

But the funny thing with learning is it doesn’t actually make you smarter. As Albert Einstein famously said : “The more I learn — the more I realize how much I don’t know”. And the secret here lies in the distinction between knowledge and understanding. I suppose what Einstein really meant was that the more he knew, the less he understood. (Yes, I realize how arrogant it is to give my own interpretation of Einstein’s words. As if the guy wasn’t sharp enough to formulate his own thoughts.) Because knowledge is a burden. And it is getting more and more so today — in the age of information overload. Since the dawn of the internet knowledge has become so accessible it’s overwhelming. Even more — the information is now aggressive — it jumps out at us on every corner, at every website we browse, through every service we consume. In this quest to catch up, to not stay behind — we gobble up more and more knowledge. We learn new tools and technologies, new methods and approaches, countless new buzzwords. And the more we learn — the less we understand.

Knowledge is a burden because it makes us biased. It creates a prism, a filter, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once we think we know something, we cut off countless other possibilities. This is where the efficiency of our thinking ruins its effectiveness.

There’s a famous Zen tale of a respected scholar who went to a Zen master. While the master was quietly preparing tea, the scholar was telling him how he wanted to learn more about Zen, because Zen was this and Zen was that. At some point the master started pouring tea into the scholar’s cup. The cup got full, but the master kept pouring. The tea spilled out of the cup and the scholar shouted: “Stop! What are you doing!? Can’t you see there’s no place for more tea?” The Zen master answered: “This cup is you. How do want to learn more if you haven’t emptied your cup?”

I am no Zen master. I am as biased and opinionated as the next techie with a couple of decades of experience. But I do realize how many of the things I learned along the way don’t contribute anything to understanding the new brave world we live in. And then — some of them do.

All I’m saying is we need to be really conscious of the cognitive biases our knowledge creates.

As a consultant — I see this with many transformation and migration initiatives at tech organizations today. People are eager to learn new stuff but they approach it with an old mindset. People want to do DevOps, to streamline their processes, but they can’t let go of the old command-and-control collaboration patterns. Developers jump into microservices, but then make them tightly coupled and start thinking about how to deploy a full integrated environment so they can run e2e tests. Past knowledge strikes us time and again, failing improvement initiatives, breeding scepticism and ruining motivation. Peter Senge in his wonderful book “The Fifth Discipline” calls this old knowledge mental models. Based on his extensive research he concludes that it’s these models that become the main stumbling block on the road to organizational and personal learning.

But how do we break out of these models? Can we forget what we already know?

Well, the answer is — we do need to stop learning once in a while. To reflect on what we know and enquire, ask questions, poke holes. Or even just meditate and watch the birds. We need to learn to discuss our assumptions and hypotheses freely and without dogmatism. With ourselves or with our colleagues and friends.

Not only we need to stop learning. We need to start unlearning. Because only by letting go of the old concepts can one truly adopt new ones.

And that’s the reason I didn’t go to a workshop today. Now is my time to unlearn. So instead of sitting in class and learning another CI/CD tool or advanced monitoring technique I’ll take a walk through the beautiful town of Bochum. And go back to learning after I’ve emptied my cup.