The Unlearning Room: When expertise becomes the problem

In tech, we are taught to trust our expertise. This series is about the moments when that expertise is exactly what causes harm.

Sandra Gonzalez founded UX for Change in 2015, and from 2017 she has been leading design teams at successful tech scale-ups. Holding these roles at once meant she was accountable to two very different things: high performance and business impact on one side, and the communities UX for Change serves on the other.

For a while, Sandra was operating under the assumption that bringing the commercial leadership structures to the purpose-driven space was the right thing to do, but she started to notice that this was not the case, and, in fact, that there were many lessons from the commercial world that she needed to unlearn in order to bring real, meaningful change to the communities she was committed to supporting with UX for Change. That realisation is what led her to train in Regenerative Leadership at The Glasgow School of Art and Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. The Unlearning Room series focuses on those moments of unlearning and how this intentional act creates the conditions to bring regenerative leadership into the room.

Why is Regenerative Leadership a skill worth getting curious about? At UX for Change we are deeply concerned with the current crisis the tech industry is in. For the longest time, commercially focused design communities had a sense of pride in how their discipline was about making the world a better place, focused on user needs and advocating for the user's pains. However, we are living in times when it is almost impossible to deny the link between our discipline's outputs and the social and planetary crisis we are all experiencing, from declining mental health across all generations, especially in children, to the environmental cost of frictionless design in fast fashion apps, to name only two.

Now is the time to start taking stock of the way we were led and the lessons of leadership we inherited that got us here.

The format of this series is simple: no pre-read, no prep; you come ready to be present for the full hour, with no checking email or doing other work during the session. Sandra kicks off the session with a ten-minute story. There won't be any fancy slides, just a human sharing a story with other humans. She will then frame the story from an unlearning angle to give the group a concrete way to talk about this unlearned lesson. You will get to share your first impressions, questions or observations. To wrap it up, she will ask you a single rhetorical question, with the intention of giving you an unlearning "device" to take to work that very same day.

Unlike most leadership talks and case studies, where the leader shares heroic last-minute saves, business impact delivered and the things that worked, this series is about the very difficult moments when things didn't go as planned, when “expertise” made things worse, and what it took to understand why. In this Unlearning Room series, these difficult moments shaped the content of this series rather than being edited out, because regenerative leadership is rooted in the complexity of the system we are part of and in sitting with the discomfort when we introduce harm into that system despite our best intentions.

This series is for anyone leading in tech, or about to be. That might mean a team, a project, a community, or the direction of the work you do without any title attached to it. What matters is that you have some influence over how things get done and are curious about unconventional lessons or the concept of unlearning.
There are only sixteen seats across two kick-off slots. We keep the groups small and intimate, nothing is recorded, and nothing leaves the room (Chatham House rules), because we want this experience to be unique and to honour the intentionality it deserves.

Pick one of the two slots available to check out this series: Tuesday 18 August at 08:00, or Friday 21 August at 12:30. The kick-off session runs at both slots so you can choose what suits you.

From 4 September the series settles into every other Friday morning, 08:00–09:00 UK time, until late November. This early start is deliberate: an hour of thinking before the day kicks in, because this is the kind of work that gets skipped if you leave it until later. The Unlearning Room series is composed of eight sessions that move you from unlearning, through the rules of leadership and where they came from, into two sessions on power, and close with strategy, gratitude and reciprocity. The final session is on 27 November, and that is where the series ends.

This kick-off is free. Sessions from 4 September are £12 each, and that price rises as the series goes on, so the people who join earliest always pay the least.

Places are limited, so I ask you to fill out a few questions during the RSVP process. I'll be in touch to confirm your spot.

To get you ready to RSVP, here are the questions you will be asked:

• Name, role, organisation
• Which kick-off session do you prefer
• What is making you curious about the concept of unlearning in a leadership setting? (a couple of sentences is plenty)
• Do you currently lead people? (formally, informally, or not yet)
• If you had found this series six months ago, would you have been as interested as you are today? If not, what has shifted for you in the last six months?

I read every one of these myself. See you in the room.

Sandra, Founder and Director of UX for Change.

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Image credit: https://www.instagram.com/cihanyum