forgetting, the importance of

In spring, hundreds of flowers;
in autumn, a harvest moon;
In summer, a refreshing breeze;
in winter, snow will accompany you.
If useless things do not hang in your mind,
Any season is a good season for you.
Mumon

Gulliver is astonished that the King of Brobdingnag does not want to learn about gunpowder in order to obtain maximum power over his subjects. However, the King argues that if people act on basis of reason they do not need ways to achieve power over others. Creativity can also be helped by learning to forget and trying to make a more effective use of the possibilities.



When we fall short of some desired objective, the initial tendency is to intensify the process of learning. We think we do not know enough. More education, more training, and more modern techniques are invariably invoked as a cure for the malaise. Yet are these the panaceas they appear to be? What purpose has education if it produces individuals who are ill-matched to the needs of their society? And what gain is there if training and new techniques are not applied because of a reluctance or an inability to change? From this last question comes the concept that all development -whether of the individual, a company or a whole nation - requires an interplay between "learning" and "forgetting".
I would like to make this point still more strongly. The ability to forget - to shed past habits, attitudes, techniques and capital resources is often at least as important as the ability to learn.
Many people are familiar with "learning curves" - the graphical analogy of the process by which skills progressively build up and more efficient methods are introduced.
Probably without realizing it, every amateur cook, or do-it-yourself houseowner has experience of the same process - the climb up the learning curve.

The more advanced and complex the technology, the longer and more painful is the climb and if the technology is advancing rapidly, then a new curve comes in sight as soon as the tip of one has been reached, so that the climb has to continue.

The reality of the learning curve has long been acknowledged in the design and the execution of very complex projects. Many people have tried to quantify it. We know for example, that as the production run of a particular motor car or radio set progresses, the efficiency of production improves and the cost continue to decrease. But if models are changed frequently or if there are sudden switches in production techniques , it becomes necessary to climb new learning curves and so the efficiency drops.

But what I want to talk about is the forgetting curves - how are old or outdated skills shed, old attitudes discarded, old plant scrapped and old traditions rejected? Few people have studied this phenomenon yet it contributes more to success in engineering-based industries than do learning curves.
Experience shows that forgetting curves proceed much gentler than learning curves, yet success in a rapidly changing industry is largely determined by the interplay between the two. Failures can be caused not so much because the forgetting curves are not steep enough but because the forgetting curves are too gradual!

The learning curve, the ability to absorb a new technology, is shaped by many factors - its complexity, the level of skills and insight it calls for, its rate of progress and the amount of capital that may be needed. An important aspect is the level of literacy (see there), numeracy and level of understanding of the people involved. People with a poor level of education will inevitably find it difficult to absorb a new techniques.
However, once people are educated above a certain level their ability to absorb increases rapidly. When someone has made a new breakthrough, a newcomer to the technology may reach a high level of competence in a relatively short time. The knowledge of machines , optical goods, small internal combustion engines, electric lamps and so on, has spread rapidly all over the world. The former dominance of some of the European nations in such technologies has been surrendered not only to Japan which has long had a high level of numeracy and literacy, but also to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea. Now contenders such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and several of the South American states are emerging as industrial manufacturers. The new competitors' products are not inferior imitations, but are at least as good as the originals - and sometimes. better. People are transferring technology ever more. rapidly around the world and anybody who believes that a particular individual or one company or country has some natural and permanent supremacy is reasoning from an illusion (cf. crisis).
But here it is important to realize that education is only part of the process. Another element is for people to be prepared to abandon favoured or safe concepts - familiar practices or cheap materials. They must face up to "change". The creative attitude involves the willingness to prepare fro change, in fact it is very much characterized by dissatisfaction and impatience with the present situation. The point is to channel this dissatisfaction and impatience into a constructive force. Paradoxically we first have to destroy the old and rearrange it in new ways.

creativity > forget the experience, remember the lesson