"Being able to learn and unlearn"

Prof. Dr. Fredmund Malik is the founder, owner and chairman of Malik, a renowned company for holistic general management, leadership and governance solutions. The habilitated entrepreneurial professor and multiple award-winning bestselling author has been setting standards for professional management with his company for years. His cybernetics-based management systems are regarded worldwide as highly developed instruments for the reliable functioning of organizations.

Professor Malik, probably the most sensitive issue in professional fitness is the shortening half-life of knowledge. How to deal with it?

Fredmund Malik: Relaxed, uninhibited, eager to learn, ready to deal with new things, ready to learn. And this fundamental willingness to learn, if it is to bring success, must not only be aimed at acquiring new knowledge. In order to be truly fit for the professional fitness required in the future, it is fundamentally important to learn how to learn efficiently. Only then will we gain the ability to cope with the increasingly rapid obsolescence of our content knowledge. Not letting the thorny issue of professional fitness that you raise become a problematic issue requires all of us to become learning experts. We all have to learn to learn new knowledge faster and better.

Why do you emphasize that?

Because the real potential for the future lies in this ability, both personally and for companies. The fact is that most people have never really learned how to learn, regardless of their current level of education. From the first day of school to the doctorate, we have mainly learned content, including content-defined methods and competencies, such as reading, writing, arithmetic, but not how to learn effectively. And to make matters worse, we have all learned more or less in the same way. Therefore, hardly anyone is aware that in adulthood no two people learn in the same way.

What does this mean in practice?

I myself have been training managers for more than 40 years now, at very different ages, from all kinds of organisations and management levels. And practice shows me quite clearly: everyone learns differently, but they don't know it. So everyone needs to figure out for themselves how they learn best. And by that I mean learning effectively, in such a way that they can also apply what they have learned, that they can learn new things, and no less importantly, that they can actively forget the old and discard it when development has passed over it.

You allude to the need to unlearn!?

Exactly! Maintaining professional fitness means learning and unlearning. Unlearning must also be learned. Otherwise the new will never succeed, because the old, which has mostly become flesh and blood, i.e. has become a dear habit and is deeply rooted in the reflexes, must be removed from the mind. The second fundamental danger for professional fitness lies in the unconscious orientation towards what used to be valid, but is no longer valid - and must no longer be valid if people and companies do not want to suffer damage.

Professor Malik, does unlearning mean throwing overboard everything that once applied?

That's how it's often presented, but it's actually nonsense. Not all knowledge becomes obsolete quickly. Not at all to the benefit of the matter, there are quite a few people who make themselves important with such claims. Most often, by the way, it's said by those who usually don't know enough about the subject areas in question. And this is especially rampant in the fog of what the mainstream believes management and leadership to be.

Your counterproposal?

My own method for recognizing real obsolescence as opposed to merely claimed obsolescence is what I call a heuristic principle, that is, to ask: "Yes, is that really true ...?" Today there is a lot of talk about algorithms, but hardly any about their "twin sister", heuristics. Algorithms are rules for intelligent and successful finding. Heuristics are rules for intelligent and successful searching. So when I hear that something is now completely new and totally revolutionary and that everything else is now hopelessly outdated, then this heuristic, this "learning trick" helps: Yes, is that really true ...? And then one searches instead of simply praying. Today, with the Internet, intelligent searching is a pleasure, because it is precisely there that not only the right and genuinely new things are to be found, but also collective nonsense, boasting and stupidity. So, professional fitness absolutely also lives from the ability to be able to search intelligently.

In the natural sciences, in technology and in medicine, we have an enormous amount of new knowledge ... ... but that does not mean, for heaven's sake, that all previous knowledge is therefore outdated and obsolete. Think of Isaac Newton's law of gravity, which he published in 1687. It is still valid. And precisely because of this, enormous further progress has been made based on it, far beyond Newton. And interestingly enough, especially in today's most innovative field - digitization and computer science - the fundamentals from the 1940s are not only still valid, but they are only now being applied at all because we now have the technology needed to do so. The foundations were laid shortly after World War II in cybernetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston: The importance of control loops, the feedback principle, and the laws of complexity. None of this is outdated; it can be widely used today in the first place - and we are still in the very early stages of doing so. However, many of even the best computer scientists don't know this. I see this every day in the companies we advise on cyber security strategies, for example. And it should also be remembered that the new does not come from the digital, but from what the digital makes possible in a new way, namely networking; this in turn leads to complexity.

One of the evolutionarily oldest components of knowledge is experience. How should it be dealt with?

Just as nature has wisely designed it by making people mortal: The experience of the individual dies with him, and the next generation, to whom one tries to pass on this experience, can build on it and make new experiences, including new mistakes, instead of always the same ones. The principle of search is not simply "trial and error," as is always claimed, but "trial and error and, building on the error, new trial and new error...." So part of this principle is that the new attempts build on the previous errors, they don't start from scratch. Experience, if you will, is a dynamic process. Experience that always falls back on itself doesn't get very far. Experience, however, that builds on mistakes and moves on from there, gets to new and better results extremely quickly. By the way, this can also be proven experimentally. Experience gained through intelligent testing and error elimination has a high value. However, this has little in common with today's much-cited "error culture", because it hardly ever distinguishes between different types of errors.

Professor Malik, being and remaining professionally fit is ultimately dependent on being able to deal with oneself in a fit manner, isn't it?

This is the foundation of professional fitness. Professional fitness requires effectiveness in self-management. And again, it doesn't come without learning and unlearning! Getting and staying fit physically, emotionally and mentally, respectively, and intellectually is the task behind the task, so to speak. And this task is not without its own challenges. For as important as it is to know one's strengths, it is equally important for professional fitness to know one's weak points. And in this respect I mean those in one's own behaviour, in dealing with oneself. My professional experience shows me time and again that if professional fitness leaves something to be desired, it is always a sign that someone is not dealing with themselves wisely.