History Lessons

On the Developer Central Blog, Mike Gunderson asks "Where the heck is our institutional memory?", questioning why the software development business finds it so difficult to learn the lessons of history. As philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I've spent a large part of my working life trying to get these lessons accepted and institutionalised within the working practices of my employers. Sometimes I'm successful, but then I get assigned to a long project out of the office (or even go off and work for someone else for a while), and when I come back things have reverted. It really seems as if these are lessons that companies simply don't want to learn, and without someone constantly agitating and evangelising they gradually fade away. Why is this? I really don't know, when study after study shows that the end result can be lower costs, higher quality and a happier and more productivity workforce. Perhaps it is just that most of the best practices require management to take a slightly longer term view, and this is something that corporate culture does not encourage. Perhaps it is because it requires management to think of people as human beings, rather than resources, which is counter to the "management by Excel" methodology now employed by most large enterprises. Whatever the reason, as the body of evidence continues to build, it should become easier to persuade people to take notice. I'll cling to that hope, anyway, despite Aldous Huxley's opinion "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach"