Curiosity
Stay interested when a possibility unsettles what you know. Reopen the question that seemed settled.
Adam Street · 14 September 2026
Could the leadership that made you successful now be holding you back?
Experience teaches us what is possible, what customers value and what change should cost. Those lessons shape our decisions, often without us noticing.
Learning while unlearning
Keep experience open to revision.
AI can help us produce a familiar plan faster while leaving its assumptions untouched. The harder leadership task is to ask whether the conditions that made our approach useful still hold.
Unlearning asks us to examine a belief or practice we may have defended, taught and built our standing around. The purpose is a better decision. Keeping an approach after testing it can be the right outcome.
Ten invitations to enquire
Choose a belief.
Bring a real decision.
Each belief has a reasonable origin. Consider what it helps you see, what it might obscure and what evidence would change your mind.
Start with a question you can investigate. Name one decision it could change and a point at which you will look again.
The familiar belief
My experience tells me what is possible.
Am I recognising a real constraint, or remembering an old one?
What still holds
Context, evidence and judgement about quality.
A prompt for reflection, drawn from the paper’s ten paradigms. It does not score or assess you.
A leader’s job is to ask tomorrow’s questions.
Critical thinking
Examine the premise as well as the answer. Apply the same scrutiny to your own reasoning and to AI.
Creativity
Give different questions, offers and ways of organising the work room to develop.
Your next step
Which belief does your team reinforce?
Bring one live strategic decision. We can help your team examine the assumptions and agree what to test.