This phrase has been echoing in my head:
"The best agency is the one that always unlearns."
It sounds catchy, sure. Almost like something you'd see scribbled on a conference slide. But there's something deeper here, something that feels uncomfortably true. Not just in theory, but in the trenches. The kind of truth that doesn’t stroke your ego, but challenges it.
What does it mean to always unlearn?
At first glance, it feels paradoxical. Agencies build their value on what they know - frameworks, expertise, case studies, best practices. That’s what clients pay for, right? Knowledge. Experience. Repeatable results. So how can the best agency be one that’s constantly letting go of what it knows?
And yet… in today’s landscape, that idea doesn’t feel crazy. It feels necessary.
Starting with the basics...
Marketing moves fast. No - faster than that. What worked a year ago might now feel tired, tone-deaf, or algorithmically punished. Platforms evolve. Culture mutates. Attention spans warp. The funnel? Shattered. Consumer journeys? Nonlinear chaos. Best practices? Quickly become clichés.
In this chaos, clinging to old knowledge isn’t safe - it’s dangerous.
That’s where the idea of unlearning comes in.
But what exactly is unlearning? It’s not forgetting. It’s not ignorance. It’s not starting from scratch every Monday. It’s something else.
Unlearning is conscious detachment from what used to work.
It’s looking at a strategy you once celebrated and asking:
“Does this still hold up in today’s world?”
And here’s the hard part - being willing to answer “no.”
It’s a quiet, almost uncomfortable process. Because it requires questioning your own success. The campaigns that won awards. The methods that brought in leads. The mental models that defined your identity.
And it’s especially hard when you're good at what you do.
The curse of competence
There’s a funny thing that happens when something works:
You want to repeat it.
And why wouldn’t you? You’ve earned that playbook. It brought results. You scaled it. Productised it. Turned it into your differentiator.
But then… something shifts. The platform changes. The audience changes. The culture changes. And suddenly, your once-golden formula feels clunky. Forced. Ineffective.
Still, the temptation is strong:
“Let’s just tweak the template a bit.”
“Maybe it’s just an off week.”
“Let’s A/B test it again.”
This is where unlearning becomes your sharpest tool, if you’re brave enough to use it.
The agency that unlearns
Imagine an agency that isn’t married to its own mastery.
One that views every success not as a static blueprint, but a snapshot in time. Something to examine, understand and eventually outgrow.
This agency doesn’t just chase trends reactively. It watches the terrain. It senses when a tactic is slipping. It experiments early. It detaches from its own ego. It dismantles the very systems it built, before the market forces it to.
That’s not just smart. It’s resilient.
But here’s the tension I keep circling back to…
Can you build deep expertise while also constantly unlearning?
At first that seems contradictory. But maybe not. Maybe the goal isn’t to erase expertise but to reframe it as something fluid. Something you evolve through, not cling to.
Think of it like this:
Learning gets you into the game.
Unlearning keeps you in it.
Why marketers need this mindset now
Let me be blunt: most marketers aren’t trained to unlearn. We’re trained to find what works and scale it. Optimise it. Turn it into a case study. Get it into a keynote deck.
But the marketing environment we’re in now? It punishes stagnation. Even the subtle kind - where you don’t realise you're stagnating, because you’re still “doing what works.”
The truth is: what “works” has an expiration date. And in many cases, we don’t see the mold until it’s already set in.
So maybe the best thing marketers can do, the highest form of strategic intelligence is to actively practice unlearning. Build it into reviews. Bake it into retrospectives. Create space to question, dismantle, and reimagine.
Not once a year.
Continuously.
Ruthlessly.
Curiously.
Final thoughts I can’t let go of...
I’m still wrestling with how you teach unlearning inside an agency. Is it a mindset? A process? A culture thing? Probably all three. But whatever it is, it needs to be deliberate.
Because unlearning doesn’t happen by accident.
It happens by design.
And maybe that’s what sets the best agencies apart.
Not how much they know.
But how willing they are to let go of it.
In a world that rewards agility over certainty,
the smartest marketers are the ones who know when to unlearn what made them smart in the first place.
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