Why Your Strategic Plan Needs a Forgetting Plan

Hermann Ebbinghaus ran an experiment on himself in the 1880s. He memorized invented syllables, things like "wid" and "zof," then timed exactly how fast his own memory let them go, working with nothing but a notebook and an almost suspicious amount of patience. It's about as unglamorous as research gets, and the insight still outlasted a hundred and forty years of much better funded studies.

Ebbinghaus found that memory decays fast without reinforcement, and then levels off. That curve became one of the most replicated findings in psychology. It's why flashcards work, why spaced repetition apps exist, and why a good onboarding program checks in at thirty days and ninety days instead of just once. We already know how to make new information stick.

What we've never really figured out is the other half of the curve. How do you make old information, old habits, old ways of doing the job actually decay? Most strategic plans don't ask that question. They pour all their energy into the new priorities and just assume the old ones will fade on their own. They don't, not without help. They persist quietly alongside the new plan until someone finally says the sentence every leader dreads: we've always done it this way.

The curve nobody plans for

Here's the asymmetry: organizations are genuinely good at reinforcing new material. Kickoff meetings, training sessions, dashboards, and 30/60/90-day check ins. All of that is built to fight the natural decay of new information, and it works.

Nobody builds the mirror version. Nobody designs a plan for the decay of old behavior, so it doesn't decay on its own schedule. It gets reinforced every single time someone defaults back to it, and nothing pushes back.

I want to draw a distinction here, because we wrote about a related but different problem last week, in a post about helping teams move beyond historical organizational strife [link]. That post was about healing. It was about teams carrying real scar tissue from bad leadership or brutal restructures, and what it takes to acknowledge that without letting it define the future. This is a different animal. Most of the time, "we've always done it this way" isn't trauma. It's just a habit that was never given a reason to stop. And habits don't respond to healing, they respond to design.

Learning is not the same as unlearning

Organizational researchers have known this for a while, they just don't call it forgetting. They call it unlearning. Hedberg (1981) was one of the first to argue that organizations have to actively discard obsolete knowledge and routines to make room for new ones, and that this discarding almost never happens by accident. That word, discard, matters. It implies action, something someone has to actually do, on purpose, rather than something that quietly wears off over time.

I've watched this play out with a client division that could recite its new strategic priorities word for word. Every leader in the room could explain the shift, in detail, with genuine enthusiasm. And every one of them was still allocating their team's time exactly the way they had for the last three years. Nobody was being dishonest. The plan simply never told them what to stop doing. It only told them what to start.

Old habits have real estate

Old behavior sticks around not because of stubbornness, but it becomes part of structure. Feldman and Pentland (2003) describe organizational routines as living inside real systems, meetings that already exist on the calendar, metrics that are already being tracked, approval chains that already run through a specific person. Those structures don't care what the new strategic plan says. They just keep operating.

This is where a lot of change efforts go wrong. They treat the old behavior as a mindset problem and try to talk people out of it. Meadows (2008) makes a useful point about this in her work on systems thinking: telling people to behave differently is one of the weakest ways to change a system. Changing the structure that rewards the current behavior is one of the strongest. Put plainly, the old meeting is still sitting on the calendar, and the old metric is still sitting on the dashboard, so of course people keep showing up for both.

Building the forgetting plan

So what does it actually look like to design intentionally for forgetting, instead of hoping for it?

It starts with naming the specific things being retired (not just the things being adopted), a metric that's no longer tracked, a meeting that's no longer happening, or a phrase that's no longer part of planning conversations. Say it out loud, in the same document where you announce the new priorities.

It also helps to make the absence visible. If a report used to include a certain metric that now quietly disappears, most people will assume it got lost in the transition. If leadership actually points out that it's gone and explains why, that turns an accidental drop into a deliberate one, and teams notice the difference immediately.

Furthermore, there's a trust layer underneath all of this that's worth naming honestly. If this is the third or fourth strategic plan in a few years, people are going to be doing quiet math about whether the old habits are actually going away this time, or whether they'll be safe to keep alongside the new one. The retirement of the old metric has to actually hold. This is less about communication and more about follow through, and it's usually the difference between a forgetting plan that works and one that just becomes one more thing everyone politely ignores.

Where this leaves us

Ebbinghaus never worked inside an organization. He had no idea his little experiment with nonsense syllables would end up explaining why a division keeps defaulting to a metric that's supposed to be dead. But the underlying truth travels well. Nothing fades on its own. It either gets reinforced, or it gets deliberately allowed to decay. Most strategic plans are excellent at the first half of that sentence. Very few are honest about the second half. A plan that only tells people what to remember is half a plan. The other half is telling them, clearly and specifically, what they finally have permission to forget.

At transform.forward, this is often the quiet, unglamorous work behind a strategic plan that actually sticks. Not just designing what's next, but identifying the structures, the metrics, the meetings, that are still quietly protecting what came before, and building a real plan to retire them. If that's the piece your organization keeps missing, we'd be glad to think it through with you. Check out more information on our strategic planning page. 

Interested in the research behind a forgetting strategy? Check out these resources: 

Ebbinghaus, H. (1913). Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology (H. A. Ruger & C. E. Bussenius, Trans.). Teachers College, Columbia University. (Original work published 1885)

Feldman, M. S., & Pentland, B. T. (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48(1), 94-118.

Hedberg, B. (1981). How organizations learn and unlearn. In P. C. Nystrom & W. H. Starbuck (Eds.), Handbook of organizational design (Vol. 1, pp. 3-27). Oxford University Press.

Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.