The powerful art of forgetting

Fiona Smith Columnist

The powerful art of forgetting

Published 04 February 2014 10:12, Updated 04 February 2014 15:55

You probably think you are pretty good atforgetting. I find it comes naturally, but others have to work at it.

Fortunately, for those of us who get around with expressions best described as befuddled, our skills at dropping memories into the trash can of oblivion become somewhat of a strength when it comes to dealing with change.

Former Disney futurist, Yvette Montero Salvatico, says the ability to learn, unlearn and relearn is becoming a core competency.

The unlearning process is important. If we refuse to let go of what we know when the knowledge is obsolete, it can interfere with our ability to keep up with the onslaught of change.

For example, we have all returned from holidays to find we have missed a few computer software upgrades and have to learn new ways to get things done. (Just last week, I came back to work – on the wrong floor – forgot my password and how to submit my expenses. See, I told you I was a natural.)

There is no point in remembering the redundant keyboard commands that worked before we went on our break – to do so would probably lead to confusion. We would always have that hesitation while we remembered which one we have to use now.

The same principle applies in other areas of work, when things change.

“The reality is that [existing knowledge] can become mental baggage and we have to figure out what to jettison. We need to let go of old data to accept new data,” says Montero Salvatico, on the phone from Florida.

When it comes to staying relevant at work, we need to understand that our knowledge is probably already out of date. Somewhere, someone is doing something that is about to change our world.

Says Montero Salvatico: “Everything you learn in your freshman year is obsolete by the time that you pick up your cap and gown when you graduate. What you learn needs to be retaught.”

Montero Salvatico is a principal in the US-based Kedge, a foresight, innovation, and strategic design firm, and she will be visiting Australia to speak at the inaugural Strategic Workforce Planning Conference, on March 26 in Melbourne.

When she was at the Walt Disney Company, Montero Salvatico led the effort to establish an internal area of strategic foresight expertise, dedicated to identifying future workforce trends and assessing their potential impact on human capital strategies.

Kodak moment

She says being a domain expert is not necessarily the pathway to relevance: “It is no longer about what you know, if you don’t know when things have changed. It is about having access to assets and knowledge.”

Montero Salvatico points to Kodak as an example of a company that was so expert in making film that it did not pay enough attention to the fact that digital devices were about to put it out of business.

“People couldn’t make sense of it,” she says. “Educational incapacity is something we all suffer from: knowing so much about what you do that you are the last to know when things change.

“I can give tons of examples – Polaroid, Sony Walkman – there was an inability to see those disrupters.”

Montero Salvatico says what many people don’t realise is disrupters tend to not come from the same industry that they are disrupting. “They come from outside your industries.”