Wealth Lost

To put perspective on this statement, there is an impressive record of success in many economies, as evidenced by the degree of wealth and living standards in the developed world. Within this broad compass there is an unnecessarily high incidence of recurring failure that if decision making were only more rigorous could be viewed as delayed success. By “recurring failure” and “rigorous,” I mean acquiring the ability not to make so many habitual mistakes and not having to reinvent already discovered wheels. In other words, better learn the lessons of history, ipso facto experiential learning, within which knowledge management is the overriding discipline alongside the more efficient management of organizational memory, the understanding of tacit knowledge and the implementation of structured reflective thinking in the pursuit of better decision making. Given the enormous cost of failure and waste that could be avoided, the potential for productivity gains is substantial, as would be an organization’s automatic advantage with pushy competitors.

For a striking illustration of the scale of the whole subject’s neglect, I refer to The Times of London, one of whose reporters had discerned the high incidence of continuing failure in the public sector. He did a computer search in Hansard, the official record of all legislative utterances in Westminster, for the words “no stone unturned,” which he decoded was “an inflated way to claim energetic action” for something gone wrong (Macintyre, 2002). Staggeringly, his computer came up with the number 4,933 over the 14-year period to 2002. “Is it really possible that someone in the House of Lords, the Commons or elsewhere in the political machine has declared their intention to leave no stone unturned, on average, once every single day for the past 14 years?” he wrote (Macintyre, 2002). My own Google search in July 2008, when this manuscript was being written, was even more surprising. I typed in “not fit for purpose,” a more fashionable description of management dysfunction first used in 2006 when a U.K. government minister, John Reid, acknowledged the leadership and management deficiencies at the Home Office. It threw up 132,000 references for the whole economy—180 times more than The Times’ figure.

How many of these citations were entirely new or repeated mistakes was not counted, but the list of reinvented wheels and other unlearned lessons—also a function of experiential nonlearning—is long, both in the public and private sectors in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.