Speaking of learning from the past, Leon Gettler’s Management Line comments today on the continuing ability of internet scammers to successfully pull of their stunts. It never ceases to amaze me how, as a race, we fail to learn from the past and continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. This isn’t restricted to individuals picking away at their keyboards, of course.

Politicians around the world are frequently caught out doing something that has been done before, getting a similar result and then wondering why their plans didn’t work out. A current war springs to mind.

And managers do it too, though often because they don’t have scope or time to learn from the past, rather than because it is inconvenient to do so. So a few pointers:

• Don’t do the same thing the same way and expect a different result;
• Never assume that ‘common sense’ will prevail (amongst your staff or your superiors – or even yourself);
• Never assume that a lesson learnt won’t need to be learnt again. (Or, for that matter, that just because the penny dropped for you, that it did for everyone else).