Building on Leadership Knowledge: Learning from Engineering's Approach to Failure
The corporate world has taken some very short-term views when it comes to results. This relentless focus on immediate outcomes has created a culture where quarterly reports and annual targets dominate decision-making, often at the expense of long-term sustainability and organisational learning.
This is partly driven by investor demands and partly driven by the ever-increasing change in consumer habits and needs. Shareholders expect consistent growth, and markets reward companies that can adapt quickly to shifting consumer preferences. However, this creates a paradox: whilst we demand rapid adaptation, we simultaneously penalise the experimentation and learning that true adaptation requires.
Along with this insatiable need for change, we find the leaders of these same organisations are disposed of in a similar short-term fashion. If the company does well the leader stays, if the company performs poorly, the leader is replaced. It even happens to football coaches! This revolving door of leadership has become so normalised that we scarcely question its effectiveness. We assume that fresh leadership will bring fresh solutions, but rarely do we consider what knowledge is lost in the transition.
A surprising downside to all this constant change is the erosion of organisational knowledge. The encumbered leader/coach cannot do what the last one did for fear of replacement and subsequently, all the knowledge that could have been is apparently swept away in the change. This, in my opinion, is not by design but more due to lack of design. Each new leader arrives with a mandate to make their mark, to differentiate themselves from their predecessor. In doing so, they often discard valuable insights, hard-won lessons, and institutional memory that could inform better decision-making.
The Engineering Approach: Building on Success and Failure
In the engineering world, when something doesn't work, the design is tackled, with or without its creators. This is what allows us to make quantum leaps in technology and discovery – we build on the successes AND failures of the previous engineers. Consider how modern aircraft design incorporates lessons from every crash investigation, how software development relies on debugging logs and error reports, or how medical research builds upon both breakthrough discoveries and failed clinical trials. The engineering discipline has created systems that preserve knowledge even when individuals move on.
Engineers don't throw away a design because it failed once. They analyse the failure, document what went wrong, understand the root causes, and use that knowledge to inform the next iteration. This iterative process, grounded in documentation and shared understanding, creates a cumulative body of knowledge that benefits everyone who comes after.
Sadly this does not happen as much in business, especially when things are going poorly. An assumption is made that EVERYTHING was wrong and we need to sweep clean and start again. In some metaphorical sense this is correct but a new broom does not fix old problems, it merely hides them and creates its own problems. The cycle repeats: new leadership arrives, implements their vision, encounters similar challenges to their predecessor, and the cycle begins anew because the lessons were never captured or shared.
The Documentation Problem: Why Leadership Lacks a Common Language
So how do we mimic the engineers and build on leadership knowledge? I believe the secret is in the way we record things. Administration and more specifically, accounting and legal compliance, have given documentation a bad name. In many cases we are just documenting things for the sake of record keeping – a task that conjures up the mundane and boring in many of us. Unlike engineering, where we have a common language, a common mode of representation and a common (although I'm sure the engineers would disagree) way of dealing with failure, leadership does not appear to have this discipline.
When an engineer documents a failure, they use standardised formats, established methodologies, and shared terminology. A structural engineer's failure report can be understood by another engineer decades later, in a different country, because the language and conventions are universal. Leadership documentation, by contrast, is often personal, idiosyncratic, and context-dependent. What one leader considers a "strategic pivot" another might view as a "tactical retreat," and without proper documentation, the reasoning behind these decisions is lost.
I call it discipline because if we took some time out daily and pondered our successful and not-so-successful activities of the day, made notes of these and investigated the reasoning behind both the successes and the failures, we would be designing and building our own language, mode of representation and ultimately designing a process for redesigning how we lead on a day-to-day basis. This isn't about creating bureaucratic paperwork – it's about creating a living knowledge base that grows with each leadership transition rather than resetting to zero.
The Power of Preserved Knowledge: Learning from Predecessors
Imagine being able to review all your predecessor's mistakes, successes and thinking. Would you be more successful? Could you learn from someone else's mistakes so that your leadership does not need to discover nor fail at the same things? This isn't about copying what worked before – contexts change, and what succeeded in one situation may fail in another. Rather, it's about understanding the reasoning, the assumptions, the trade-offs, and the lessons learned. It's about standing on the shoulders of those who came before, rather than starting from scratch each time.
Putting aside our ego (and that is a whole course at university), it would be amazing to be able to build on our skills whilst enhancing the existing knowledge or process, knowing that even if you fail, your efforts are not going to be swept out of existence when you leave. Your contributions would become part of an evolving body of organisational wisdom, and your successor would benefit from both your successes and your failures. In this way, leadership becomes a cumulative discipline, where each leader adds value not just through their tenure, but through the knowledge they leave behind for those who follow.
The challenge, of course, is creating systems that make this documentation meaningful, accessible, and useful rather than burdensome. But if we can learn to document leadership decisions with the same rigour and purpose that engineers document their designs, we can transform leadership from a series of disconnected tenures into a continuous process of organisational learning and improvement.