McGee’s Musings

In a field where the popular (or at least ubiquitous) Moore’s Law focuses on the future, why bother to study history? Specific technology solutions of even a few years ago are hopelessly obsolete. There certainly appears to be more than enough new things to learn. What do we gain by looking backward?For one, past technology decisions shape and constrain the decisions we can make today. They form the context within which we work. To use economist Kenneth Boulding’s observation, “Things are the way they are because they got that way.” Studying why and how can yield insight into decisions we face now.

We don’t end up in business in general or technology in particular by looking backwards. We are future-oriented; to a fault more often than not. Some of us are gradually getting more disciplined about paying attention to the recent past at least by way of such techniques as After Action Reviews. As we connect our systems to the systems of other organizations and institutions and as more and more of our data becomes embedded in digital form, we would be wise to develop a much deeper appreciation for history and how the decisions that constrain us today were generally made for sound reasons at the time.

As you start looking farther backward, you might also want to start thinking about tools that are useful on a longer time frame than the AAR. Art Kleiner and others have had success with developing Learning Histories, for example, that try to look backward at important organizational decisions and events for the lessons they contain. When you become involved in projects to link with systems or databases from other organizations or from the organizational “distant past” take the time to dig into why “things are the way they are” and how “they got that way.”