If you want to radically imagine something different, the first step is often NOT to dive into building something new.

It might be more important to start by unlearning something that blocks you from seeing all the possibilities. 

Unlearning takes work. It’s like planting a garden. If there are a whole lot of weeds, you can’t just start laying down seeds. You have to pull the weeds first to make room for something new to grow.

Unlearning starts with asking yourself:

• What wasn’t working?
• What was unjust?
• What do I never, ever want us to do again?

You might want to unlearn something small within your own work, or something big that impacts your whole organization. 

We’ve heard from many Change Network members who work to unlearn ways they’ve engaged externally with their community. Maybe you’ve never really shared power with a partner before. 

Or perhaps you’ve always involved people in short term or superficial ways. One team champion, an intern, talked about how her organization needed to unlearn this kind of one-off approach to communities to really build trust and more fruitful partnership with their community of interest. Others are focused on unlearning internal practices. Perhaps you want to unlearn an assumption about what it means to be professional. Or maybe you want to unlearn your own approach to attempting to make change. 

There likely are people in your organization who have spent a lot of time thinking about what’s broken and how it could be transformed. Maybe they don’t have a lot of power. Maybe they’ve even been criticized for speaking up. If we want to unlearn broken systems, it’s time to listen to these folks - giving them acknowledgement, maybe even an apology. And then working together to build something better.

We're sharing one exercise - one approach - to try to intentionally unlearn something at your organization.