Unlearning: The Missing Transformative Leadership Capability for AI and Beyond

As AI and other emerging technologies reshape organisations, leaders are rightly focused on what they need to learn: new tools, skills, capabilities and ways of working.

But meaningful transformation also depends on something less often discussed: how we unlearn the assumptions, routines and mental models that keep old patterns in place.

Drawing on Rona Puntawe’s grounded theory research, this seminar introduces the Unlearning Meta-framework—a practical lens for understanding how unlearning occurs across individual, organisational and societal levels. It explores five principles that reveal how deeper, collective forms of unlearning can create space for new possibilities.

While AI provides the immediate context, the conversation looks beyond it to emerging technologies, including quantum innovation. The question for leaders is not only how to adopt what is new, but how to create the conditions to shape technological change towards meaningful and societal value.

How can you enable the unlearning needed for what comes next?.

About the Presenter:

Rona Puntawe is a transformation leader, Board Director with Social Enterprise Australia, and doctoral researcher with more than 20 years of international experience in organisational transformation, change and innovation. Across senior roles with KPMG, EY and local government, her work has contributed more than $40 million in measurable organisational value.

Her research focuses on unlearning as a capability for transformative change. She developed the Unlearning Meta-framework through interviews with international experts in transformative leadership and education, and has presented this work across Europe and Asia. Her research was most recently published by Springer Nature in its World Sustainability Series.

Rona is a doctoral scholarship researcher in the inaugural joint PhD programme between the University of Sydney Business School and the University of Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School. Her doctoral research explores how emerging technological innovation can be directed and governed to better serve societal good.