NOEL:  Hello and welcome to Episode 57 of the Tech Done Right Podcast, Table XI's podcast about building better software, careers, companies and communities. I'm Noel Rappin. 

Our guest today is Barry O'Reilly, author of the book, "Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results." In it, he sets out a cycle for defining outcomes, identifying behaviors that might help or hinder reaching the outcomes and then unlearning existing behaviors and relearning new ones. We talk about how that process works in practice, how to use it yourself, how it might fail and also what Barry unlearned in the process of writing the book. We'd like to hear from you. What's something you've need to unlearn to reach success? Let us know at TechDoneRight.io/57 or on Twitter at @Tech_Done_Right.

Before we start the show, one quick message. Table XI offers training for developer and product teams. If you want me to come to your place of business and run an interactive hands-on workshop, I would very much like to do that. We can help your developer team learn topics like testing or Rails and JavaScript or managing legacy code or we can help your entire product team improve their Agile process. If you're in the Chicago area, be on the lookout for monthly public workshops. As you listen to this, we will have just finished our first "How to buy software?" workshop and keep an eye out for more to come. For more information, email us at Workshops@TableXI.com or see as on the web at TableXI.com/Workshops. And now, here's the show with Barry O’Reilly.

Barry, would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners?

BARRY:  Yeah. My name is Barry O’Reilly. I'm a business advisor, entrepreneur and sort of a coach and consultant for organizations that are trying to create higher performance, better products and services and deliver better to their customers. I've written two books. One called "Lean Enterprise," which was part of Eric Ries' Lean Series and after the lean startup came out, lots of people were interested in experimentation but they were like, we're not a startup. We're a bigger company but scaling up is what we have to do.

Myself, Jez Humble who some people might know from Continuous Delivery, writing that book and a few other things and Joanne Molesky sort of came together as a cross functional team and described for the high performance organization that's adapting experimentation in product, finance, business strategy and their culture and then more recently, I've just released a new book called "Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results" and that was really inspired by my experience from coaching a lot of these executives and senior leaders in companies about doing innovation and while I was continually finding that while learning new skills and strategies were difficult, it wasn't the limiting behavior. It was actually helping people unlearn their existing mindset and behaviors.

What I did was created a system to help people rapidly experiment with new behaviors, new thinking to drive the extraordinary results and looking forward to sharing some of it to you today.

NOEL:  Let's talk about the book here. The book is called "Unlearn" and one of the things I like about it is that it really foregrounds the unlearn part of the process. This is the kind of thing that there are a lot of people who have opinions on how to change behavior, how to build habits. The thing I like about this book is it focuses on a step that is kind of overlooked in some of the other material on this topic, which is letting go, unlearning the past behavior even if that past behavior is successful. What are some of the experiences that led you to believe that this was a very important part of a growth mindset?

BARRY:  You know, learning organizations have been around for a long time. I think when Peter Senge wrote the Fifth Discipline in the 1990s, it sort of exploded into the world. Everybody was like, "I'm in a learning organization. We're constantly learning." It sort of came to me that people were taking in new information but they weren't adapting their behavior based on that new information or even as a precursor to that, they weren't even considering where the behaviors and thinking that they were responsible in themselves, actually driving the outcomes that they wanted.

That was more of a moment to consider to say, "Is what I'm doing working? Is it giving me the results I want? If not, then I probably need to unlearn what I'm doing and relearn some new behaviors to potentially help me get there," and that was a real big distinction for me, rather than just this concept of continuously learning.

One of the analogies and stories I use in the book is a famous fable about a cup of tea where as you pour a cup of tea, it starts to fill up to the brim and if you continue to pour new water into that cup, it's just overflowing and really, what we're thinking about here is sometimes, you have to empty your cup to make space for new information to come in and you just continuously learn things. It's just like pouring stuff over your existing behaviors and methods but are you really changing your behavior? Are you really adapting your thinking? Ultimately, is it driving you towards the outcomes that you want.

I think for people who really pour, actually good experimentation is they rarely define the outcomes that they're looking for in a crisp and concise manner and then, do they often hold themselves accountable to those outcomes and owning that as in you're responsible for your behaviors and thinking to adopt. Not some other team, not the product didn't work, like you owning that situation and then recognizing you have to unlearn to relearn and get the right thing that you're looking for and that's really a system that I started to develop from working with these phenomenally talented executives and leaders, people who are running multi-billion dollar organizations and they're very, very competent people.

Sometimes, I think when I say to people about unlearning, they get a little upset. They sort of take it as, "Are you saying, all my experiences are no longer relevant, none of my skills are relevant?" and nothing could be further from the truth. The way I describe unlearning is it's a process of letting go and reframing or moving away from once useful mindsets and acquired behaviors that were effective in the past but now limiting your success. It's not forgetting, removing or discarding knowledge or experience. It's just a conscious act of letting go of outdated information and actively engaging and taking in new information to inform effective decision making and action and when you get into that type of mindset and that pattern and that behavior of continuously taking in new information to challenge your existing natural models and using that information to adapt in light of the outcomes you're trying to drive, extraordinary things can happen.

NOEL:  There are a lot of different places I want to take this. One of the first places I want to start is just sort of a pragmatic kind of a question. Say, I am a person who is trying to create a new skill or I am trying to be successful in a new area. First of all, what things should I look for, in my own behavior that might lead me to believe that I need to go through an unlearning cycle? Or is this just part of every learning cycle? Every time I go to a new concept, there's something that I need to let go of.

BARRY:  The most important thing to start with, regardless of whether you're trying to unlearn or learn or relearn or whatever, is you've got to actually describe the outcome you're aiming for, like what is success for you. If you're trying to get fitter -- that's abstract -- how fit are trying to get? Are you trying to be able to run a mile in under four minutes? Are you trying to be able to run a marathon in six months? Or you need to start to quantify things? Because the more crisp you can actually make the definitions of your outcomes, you've got something to measure yourself against. You've got an aspiration or outcome that you're trying to achieve and it's a target. It's a direction you're trying to go.

Then you can start to ask yourself, "What of my behaviors are helping me move towards that outcome? Is eating cheeseburgers five times a day helping me run a marathon? Or is eating a little healthier or is exercising a small bit each day?" These are all different behaviors that you can start to list out that might drive you towards this outcome and then you're really starting to think about, "Of all these different behaviors, which ones do I think is the best behavior for me? Or where should I start?" and then selecting one of those behaviors and starting to experiment with them. Maybe you will not select the "eating five cheeseburgers a day." You might say something like, "Doing some light exercise to start, walking around the block, running around the block the next week, building it up." These are some of the prerequisites that you need to start thinking about how you want to achieve the things you want to achieve and then what behaviors are you currently doing that might be holding you back or what behaviors that you're lacking that you might need to incorporate.

NOEL:  Is the unlearning there -- the unlearning part of it -- the identification of behaviors or habits that are holding you back from your goal and then deliberate effort to change those behaviors? Am I characterizing it correctly or not?

BARRY:  Yeah. I think that's one facet of it. The reason people don't achieve the outcomes they're aiming for isn't just because the existing behaviors they have. It can often be that they're lacking certain behaviors and they need to incorporate them. All the behaviors they've tried before were just not the right behaviors for them and they haven't experimented enough with other options to get them there.

One of the exercises I do in a lot of these leaders is once I get them to define the outcomes that they're aiming for, I get them to come up with different behaviors that they think could get them there. I generally ask them to list between 10 or 15 different types of behaviors they think could drive them towards the outcome that they're doing. The reason I do that is people generally come up very quickly with two or three behaviors because they're all the things that are sort of comfortable are known to them and often, they're the behaviors they're already doing.

The sort of a question there to say, if the outcome you're aiming for is to run a marathon and the existing behaviors you're performing have not helped you get there, they're probably not the right behaviors to get you there, so by pushing people to come up with more like 10 or 15, they start stretching their thinking about different possibilities that they might use to get there and often what I find is the behaviors that drive the outcomes people really want are not the most obvious and they're actually somewhat uncomfortable because they force people to do things a little bit outside their comfort zone that's new to them, that they might not feel like they have competency or deep skill in.

But often, when you're trying to get to these outcomes but you haven't been achieving them with your existing behaviors, adopting these new behaviors that you mightn't have been aware of, you might have been afraid of or you might just have never tried before, can actually be sometimes the ones that unlock the performance level that you're looking for.

NOEL:  That reminds me of something that we kind of do as part of our design sprint process with clients here is that we do very, very fast prototyping like sketching, where people try to do, I think it's eight and eight -- eight different sketches in eight minutes.

BARRY:  Yeah, Crazy Eights.

NOEL:  Yeah, that's it. Thank you -- for exactly the same reason because the things that you're going to come up with immediately are the obvious things and only by sort of digging deeper and coming up with things that are a little bit harder to reach or a little bit more uncomfortable, do you really get to things that might actually change or affect the behavior that you're looking for.

BARRY:  Correct, and a lot of this thinking is grounded in a lot of these methods of design thinking. This field is inspired from behavior design and inspired by the work of BJ Fogg who's one of the primary thinkers in this space and so many people are thinking about outcomes that you're aiming for behaviors that you have. To use your product analogy, when you're building a product, you've got outcomes you're aiming for with that product and this sort of behaviors of a product are really its features. A product has a set of features just like people have a set of behaviors.

What you're doing with products is you're constantly innovating the features of your product to try and find your product market fit, to try and find your customer that you'll deliver amazing experiences to them and they'll use your product more and really, what we're doing is thinking about yourself as a product and you have a set of behaviors and you need to be continuously adapting your features, your behaviors to cope with changing contexts that you're in, circumstances that you're in, challenges that you're facing.

Because if you get stuck with a fixed set of features or a fixed set of behaviors, I guess my argument has always been that it's not companies that get disrupted. It's people that get disrupted -- leaders of these companies because they get fixed using the same behaviors that they've always used that may have made them successful in the past but the world has changed, technology has changed, customer demands have changed and yet, they're still using the same behaviors that had previously made them successful and that's when you're prone to disruption.

NOEL:  Yeah and it often doesn't even require the world to change that much. It's just that the things that work for you when you're a small company -- with five or 10 people, as a leader -- don't work anymore when you're a larger company with 50 or 100. You have to change your behavior not because the entire world around you has changed but because your context is continually changing.

BARRY:  And startup founders, I spend a lot of time, not necessarily with startup founders, founders with like four or five in the company but I spend a lot of time with scale up founders -- people who have started to get product market fit and their business is starting to grow and what they realize is that not only their leadership style needs to be unlearned and relearned but their whole systems of operation of their organization start breaking down. Because again, as you alluded to, the things that made you successful with five employees, 10 employees, 30 employees, are not going to be the things that make you successful until you get to 100, 300, 1000. You've got to constantly be adapting to that changing circumstance.

That's where I spend a lot of time -- helping leaders sort of go through that transition in an effective way, so they build a system to continuously adapt to the outcomes they're aiming for. Those outcomes change, their context changes, their situation changes but they have this system to continuously adapt their behavior and find out what's working and what's not, quickly, cheaply, and as effectively as possible.

NOEL:  As you point out in the book, this is a cycle. This is not something that you do once and kind of forget it. It's a continual process, I think, of re-identifying those outcomes and behaviors because the world keeps changing.

BARRY:  Yeah. This cycle part is really important. One of the stories I shared in the book is from working with International Airlines Group. They are the sixth largest airline in the world. They own British Airways, Iberian, Vueling, Aer Lingus, Qatar Airlines owns 10% of them. It is a massive airline and their leadership knew that they were sort of struggling to achieve the outcomes that they wanted from their innovation activities and the way that they were even training leaders to do innovation.

One of the classic things we do that needs to be unlearned about training leadership is we think we can just sit people in a classroom for two days, tell them to think differently and suddenly, hope that they're going to start acting differently but people go through these courses, they learn lots of information but then they go back and none of their behavior changes. One of the things we recognized at IAG is that they really called out that, "We're not getting the levels of outcomes that we want from our leadership transformation, so we're going to have to do something different." They had the courage to do that.

What we did was take six of their most senior leaders out of their business for eight weeks with the goal of launching new businesses to disrupt their existing business. As a part of sort of exploring those new ideas, we're going to teach them all these new methods of experimentation and how to rapidly test ideas and scale up businesses at speed when you see a good signal and as a result of being part of that, not only would they hopefully disrupt the company but they disrupt themselves. It was very interesting like in the first week of the program, I had one of these very senior executives in the airline company who had this great idea to transform the airline booking industry and all we had to do was just build this idea.

This was a classic behavior of leadership. They're very experienced people, very smart people, know their domain very well, so their tendency is to have the answer and push it onto their customers. What we did was sat down with this leader and we got them to try and create a prototype as he described it and showcase it to a customer, so how do you think that went?

NOEL:  I read the book so I know how it went.

BARRY:  Right. It didn't go so well. But again, the learned behavior of the executive was frustration. They were like, "I know this idea is great. That's the wrong customer. Get me the right customer," so we went through this process again. We found another customer, ran this experiment and they got the same result -- the customer had no idea -- and we did this for a couple of times until we sat down with the executive and asked him, "What do you think is the real problem here?" and they were like, "The idea is the problem, not the customer." That was their sort of unlearning moment as I describe it, where they recognized that they were pushing their ideas onto their customers. Their expertise was actually holding them back from learning and really when they started to recognize that the job was not to push ideas onto customers but the pull the information they need from customers to build great products, that was a huge breakthrough for them. They had sort of unlearned that the outcomes that they were aiming for was a great product, they weren't getting that, they relearned by doing these small experiments and got these breakthroughs.

That executive went on to be, I think, one of the best experimenters I've ever worked with because it sort of reactivated their curiosity again in the space. They stopped seeing their responsibility to know all the answers or they started seeing their strategies as hypotheses or their assumptions as hypotheses to be tested with customers as quickly and cheaply as possible. When they could do that, everything sort of started to become an experiment to them and they could reactivate their limiting assumptions and see them as experiments to be tested.

I suppose that this sort of example of the cyclical part of that is a few weeks in... Oh, sorry, months after we had done this eight-week program, that executive sent me an email and they're like, "One of the team came in to me today to try and sign off a new product they've been working on," and my response was simple, "Why are you getting me to sign this off. You should be at the airport getting our customers to sign it off by using the product." You know, that sort of gave the insight, not only the one breakthrough that they had, how they sort of scaled that breakthrough and then we're coaching other people to get that breakthrough crossed our organization. That's the kind of extraordinary results and ultimately, impact we're aiming for as we take people through these cycles of unlearning or the exec camps, which is the programs I run to help executives go through this process.

NOEL:  Right, so just to put a point on that, in terms of the cycle behavior, we have an outcome, an attempt to improve the booking process for the customers but we have a behavior of sort of top-down imposition that's getting in the way of that and that is the behavior that has to be let go of, that has to be unlearned. One of the things I like about the way that you set up the process of the book is that you have this step where you start off by enumerating large scale goals and then you come down to the very small habits that you can build up. We've kind of talked about this already but in this case, we have this large goal and then we sort of try to identify small things that build to that.

There's two things that I want to kind of ask here. One is like, what are steps that people take in situations like this that actively help them unlearn behaviors? And I guess the second part is how do you help them to make that leap from their large goals to their small actions that can help them toward that goal?

BARRY:  These are some of the fundamentalists of the system that was created. One of the main mantras that you constantly will hear me say in the book is just think big, start small, and learn fast. The idea behind that is that you should be thinking big. It's important to have a big aspiration or outcome that you're aiming for because if you don't aim big, you'll typically end up just coming up doing the same things you've always done, so it's important to set like a challenging, somewhat uncomfortable goal that you're aiming for or outcome or aspiration, really.

Then really, what I say to people then is if that's the outcome that you're aiming for, what are some of the behaviors that will get you there? And people will come up with all sorts of behaviors. The example in this case is IAG. At the organizational level, they had an outcome that they want to launch six new ideas to disrupt their business. The executive who was part of this program had an outcome where they wanted to increase the booking rates on these platforms by 40% in the next six months. One of the ideas that they had to do that was build this platform. That's just the product idea, then they had themselves. As a leader, they wanted to become an exceptional leader in innovation and some of the behaviors that they thought might help them get there was running more experiments or talking to customers. They start listing out all these different behaviors that they could be doing.

Now, often when people even list those behaviors, they are still too big. That executive could have talked to hundreds of customers but what I always try to do is say, "Can we make something really, really, really small to start? A small behavior that we think might drive us to this outcome and gets us started." Again, the example in this instance was that executive was like, "Sure. I'll just run an experiment with one customer. I can do it in three minutes."

Now, the thing about that is if their aspiration was to be a great innovation leader and one of the behaviors they thought they could do that was spend more time with the customers and the way they could make that really, really, really small is just to talk to one customer about their new idea, very quickly they started and they're starting to get a feedback loop. They're testing their hypothesis of a behavior that would help them be a great innovation leader to talk to customers. They're relearning very quickly by talking to customers and they're performing these new behaviors. They feel successful very quickly and it also tells them that the behaviors that they're trying are aligned to the outcome that they're trying to get to and it's a system.

Then after trying to do those sorts of behaviors, you reflect on them and you ask them, "One of the things you wanted to do is be a great innovation leader. One of the behaviors we said we try is talking to customers more. You've tried, what was your sort of insights? And did you feel like that was a good behavior that you should do more of or you should innovate it? Did you change it?" and that gives them a sort of breakthrough in their own sort of thinking and acting and that starts the virtuous cycle -- they do some behaviors, they see the benefits of them, they want to do more of them or they want to try more new behaviors, versus sometimes they'll try behaviors that actually disastrous for them but that's okay too because we figured out behaviors that don't work for them and essentially, the problem space has got smaller and we'll just pick up another behavior for them to try and keep moving through this.

A lot of what I'm trying to do them -- teach these people -- is not just experimentation on their products or services but it's experimentation for the way that they tackle any challenge. It's systematic thinking, paired with scientific approach really, and experimenting. I think that the results that I share from the stories in the book really give you a sense of how transformative this can be for some people who are willing to get outside of their comfort zone, own the outcomes that they're achieving or not achieving and rather than sort of push it on to somebody else, say, "I'm responsible for this. If I want to change the system or change the situation, I've got to change myself," and that's kind of the starting point for a lot of these great leaders that you work with and the thing I've just thoroughly enjoyed is, once people start this stuff, they love it because executives and high performers, they want to make good decisions. They want to improve, they want to get better and when you help them and make an intentional, deliberate system that they can use, they just accelerate because there are very bright, competent people. It's a real joy to watch them accelerate through that process and improve their results as taking part in it.

NOEL:  When people don't succeed with the system, which I assume happens sometimes, what are common causes of not being able to improve yourself through the cycle? And has watching people not succeed at this when you had that opportunity? Has that changed the way that you present the ideas to the next person?

BARRY:  Yeah, absolutely. Building the system was an iterative process in itself. I guess the thing what I learned is that there's a number of characteristics that you've got to cultivate within yourself if you're going to unlearn. The first one is sort of curiosity and that's this idea that how open are you to new information that goes against your existing thinking. A real simple example is say, you're working with someone more junior than you and you give them a task to do and they come back and their plan is to tackle it a radically different way than you. What's your natural reaction? Is it to stop them and say, "No, you don't do it that way. You do it this way?" Or will you go, "Oh, that's interesting. Why are you trying to solve it like that?"

That's a very simple example of a behavior where somebody is curious or not. If they're not curious, they can't get new information, therefore, they can't challenge their existing mental model. That's one thing that's important. The ownership piece, I think I've spoken about a bit, it's easy to celebrate success when things are working and attribute it to yourself but it's harder to own when you're not achieving the outcomes that you want and saying that it's your responsibility to change your approach. That's courage. That's what requires courage to sort of take that step idea.

The other thing is commitment and what I mean by that is commitment to sort of explore behaviors and methods that don't feel natural to you, that you might suck at and that's sort of another part is this idea of being comfortable with being uncomfortable, which I talk about quite a lot with these leaders is if you're not sort of actively creating scenarios where you're uncomfortable, that means you're just always staying inside your comfort zone. You're known and there's no growth there.

The interesting leaders I always find are the ones who are actively creating scenarios where they're getting outside their comfort zone because that's where the growth is and the way you make that work is probably the underpinning part of all of this, you create safety for people to succeed. What I mean by creating safety to succeed is that's why thinking big and starting small is so important because if you start small, that means you're going to learn fast if the thing is working for you or not. It's recoverable if you are taking a small step and it doesn't work. When you think big and you go big, that opens up the possibility for catastrophic failure, so the idea of thinking big and starting small is really about safety, fast feedback loops and helping people iterate really fast over behaviors to find out the one that's perfect for them.

NOEL:  One of the points you make in the book really nicely is the idea that most environments in most companies don't reward feeling uncomfortable and don't reward exploration and really, want people to exude confidence over the right answer. Do you find a lot of pushback when you present the suggestion that people need to try and be uncomfortable in order to grow?

BARRY:  I don't think I get pushback but I don't get active uncomfortableness that people put themselves in. That's always the hard part. Again, one of the things they talk about is it's very easy for people to digest ideas and go, "Yeah, that's a great idea and we should do that," and then they go back to their desk and they continue to do what they've always done.

What I talk a lot about is that the way that you shift mindset is not telling people to think differently. They have to act differently, so they have to take action. When I present the idea to leadership by saying, "You've got to be comfortable with being uncomfortable," and they're like, "That's us." Now, I'm like, "Right. Now, let's go ahead and talk to some customers about your new idea," and if the response is, "It's not ready yet. We need to spend six more months perfecting it before we test it in the market. Customers wouldn't know what they want. I'm Steve Jobs. I just tell people what they want."

When you start to see that, that's not getting uncomfortable. That's them sticking to the behaviors that are known to them and that's where I sort of call it and say, "If you want to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, you're going to have to try something you have not done before." I'm not setting you up for failure here. We're going to start small. You're just going to talk to one customer. What's the worst thing that can happen? It's just be you and a customer in a room, have a talk with them, see what you learned, it's safe to fail. You can recover if you don't like it. You don't have to speak to 100 customers at one time. You don't have to speak to one customer with a 100 people watching you. You're just going to have a conversation with a customer and see what you learn.

It's starting small to making it safe, making it quick that they can experiment and learn if this behavior is something that could be valuable for them. That along with other stories in the book from working with the airline industries, with some of the world's largest banks, NASA, all these organizations where you have very, very bright people and a lot of the time their existing behaviors are holding them back from moving forward and really, what I'm trying to do is help them adapt those behaviors to changing circumstances as they progress.

NOEL:  Yeah. Was there something the you had to unlearn to get this process correct, to get this process to be as effective as possible?

BARRY:  So much and it took me a long time to sort of recognize that pattern as well too. Everything I do is a continuous experiment in itself. Writing the book was the experiment in itself. I'm a solid history of D pluses or maybe D minuses, I think if I'm being real honest in English literature in school and I thought if I had to write a book, I had to type out all the words and one of the things I learned from and actually have to unlearn is that the outcome I was seeking when I'm creating a book is not to type all the words. It's to create content and then, I had options about how I could create content. One behavior is to type, another behavior is to talk, another behavior is to transcribe your thoughts.

You know, I found by iterating on this that actually speaking and transcribing was a much more effective way for me to create content, rather than feeling I had to sit there and type the words. You know, that's just a very simple example on myself, a moment that I had to sort of unlearn writing and typing. Now, writing means creating content. Creating content means there's options to create content, so how are you going to do it? What's the best behavior for you? And then I found that the most efficient behavior for me was talking. This is just a simple example of how I applied this sort of thinking to myself all the time.

NOEL:  Another point you make in the book is that a lot of the benefit of the process comes from reflection and then this reflection is also often uncomfortable. You go outside of your comfort zone, not just from doing new activities but also from thinking about the activities that you're doing in a deeper way. What do you find helps people focus on that kind of reflection and do it effectively?

BARRY:  Having deliberate space and time to do it, not just rushing through these things but actually giving yourself time. The other important prerequisite is you have to have defined the outcome that you're aiming for and think others results to compare and contrast what you achieved versus what you had hoped for. Another really important part of this is to have people help you. By sharing some of the things you're trying to unlearn with other people in your company, that gives them awareness of what you're trying to do but also, the opportunity for you to invite feedback from your peers as you're starting to try new behaviors, which ones do they think are helping you move forward or are holding you back.

Then a lot of this is like actually doing some critical thinking on yourself and reflecting on the outcome you're aiming for, the results you're getting, the behaviors that you're trying, the success you're seeing or the failures that you're seeing, and then what are you going to do differently based on that information that you're gathering. How is that going to inform your decision making and action, to change what you're doing?

Often when I do this with clients is I have a worksheet that we sort of work through and ask these sort of questions that they're using some sort of rigorous method to reflect on the results and the information they're gathering to an informed decision making and action, which is sort of that critical final step of unlearning. It's what are you going to do differently based on what you've learned. They're some of the key things I always get people to try and think about when they're going through this process.

NOEL:  You deal a lot with people who are in leadership roles. Do you think there's any difference in the process when it's dealing with people who are, perhaps not necessarily leaders but hope to become leaders or just looking to you grow their own skills and improve their career just for their own? Are there different takeaways or does the process basically apply up and down the spectrum?

BARRY:  I've always been a believer that everyone's a leader and really, it's up to you to sort of grow into what your leadership style is and for some people, grow into a leadership position and a more formally organizational recognition of that. But what I've discovered from people who've read this book or applied the system is that so few people -- it's very interesting -- I'd say about 50% of the people reach out to me, they tell me a story that when they're in their company and they were a contributor and now they are a leader and it's helped them change or they were a contributor and now, they've a different role and it's helped them change, that's really rewarding to hear that.

But what's even more interesting is people will send me things about people who quit smoking and how this helped them, people who are trying to get fitter, people who are trying to eat healthier, people who are trying to spend more time with their kids and improve their relationships with their kids. It's been really phenomenal, so much so that it's inspired me now to start getting the people to share those stories back with the community because that's what's really interesting about this. For me, the interesting thing about this idea is not what I think. It's how people are using it in ways that I couldn't have anticipated and that's probably the most rewarding thing and really, what I'm trying to do now is just encourage those people to share their stories of unlearning with the community and inspire other people. That's what I'm most excited about and then, stay tuned to my channels and you'll be starting to see some of the stories emerged.

NOEL:  Is there some really important piece in this that people should know that we haven't talked about yet?

BARRY:  Unlearning is not about being smart, it's not being competent, it's not being perfect. It's really just about starting. Anyone can do this and really, what this system is it's just an intentional way to deliberately practice experimentation and growth and primarily, on things that you want to grow on. Don't feel like that there's an inhibitor to this or there's something stopping you. The thing I just get you to think about is right now, write down an outcome or aspiration that you have, put it down on a sheet of paper, try to list 10 behaviors you think could help you move towards that outcome, take one of those behaviors, think about how you can make it really, really small like what you could do in a day, what you could do in the next hour and then, try that new behavior and find out for yourself if that helps you move towards the outcome you're aiming for. It's that simple. You could start literally in the next hour after listening this podcast.

If you do, send me a tweet or an email at @BarryOReilly and I look forward to hearing the results and hopefully, extraordinary results about the experience. My website is BarryOReilly.com and I'm on Twitter at @BarryOReilly and on LinkedIn, so you'll find me in the internet and come say hello.

NOEL:  Great and the book is Unlearn and it's available wherever you would get books. Barry, thank you very much for being on the show. I really appreciate it.

BARRY:  The pleasure. Now, thanks very much for having me and look forward to hearing from your listenership.

Tech Done Right is on the web at TechDoneRight.io and on Twitter at @Tech_Done_Right and is available wherever you listen the podcasts. The show is a production of Table XI which you can find on the web at TableXI.com or on Twitter at @TableXI. I'm Noel Rappin and you can find me on Twitter at @NoelRap and our editor is Mandy Moore. She's at @TheRubyRep on Twitter and if you like this show, please tell your friends, colleagues, your entire social media network, random people on the subway, tell me, tell my boss, that would all be very, very helpful and a review on Apple Podcast will help people find the show.

Table XI is a UX design and software development company in Chicago, with a 15-year history of building websites, mobile applications and custom digital experiences for everyone from startups to storied brands. Find us at TableXI.com where you can learn more about working with us or working for us and we'll be back in a couple of weeks with the next episode of Tech Done Right.