Look back and Learn

It is a good practice to live our lives as much as possible in the present. Idle dreaming of the future or bitter regretting of the past take us nowhere, it is the present we have the power to influence.

While living in the present is a good general rule, there are useful things that the future and the past can do for us. The future offers us hopes that can become plans or intentions. And the past offers us the chance to learn, and sometimes to celebrate.

Learning from the past is a laudable objective of many companies, yet it does seem hard to achieve. In Shell we had an enormous computer repository of all sorts of data, called Livelink, where people dutifully recorded their activities. The problem was that, in general, no-one ever accessed this data ever again. No wonder smart cynics used to call it Deadlink.

I often wondered why this was. My main conclusion was that we humans are often too arrogant or too stressed to take the trouble to ask questions of the past. Somehow, it seems like cheating, or it takes away the fun of problem solving. True, but there had to be more to it than that.

I was handed a fortuitous clue this month when a friend sent me a link to an old promotional clip for Shell Centre, made soon after the building opened in the 1960’s. Thanks George, it gave me a laugh as well as setting me thinking. You can watch it for yourself on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zUQD1p9bXY&feature=related&&

There are some predictable take-aways from the film. Anyone in the 1960’s showing off about the state of technology then, be it telephones, switchboards, typing pools or mail rooms would not be too surprised to learn that things have moved on apace since.

There were some physical areas where it struck me how little progress there had been since the 1960’s. All the public areas of the building, the lifts, the canteen and the offices all looked much the same forty years after the film was made. True, nowadays no one would bother to show off about the speed of a lift. But it seems we have made little progress in how buildings work for us.

And in some areas we have got worse. Security has become more pervasive and intrusive than ever. Sometimes in recent years it took me 15 minutes to gain access to Shell Centre, unthinkable in the 1960’s. Yes, there are new threats. But I fear that security is just slapped on without much thought for the typical person. Just look at the journey from the front door of an airport onto a plane – it is not designed with us in mind.

However, in the video the most telling things were social ones. We learn most about the things that were never highlighted in the commentary. Someone had taken the trouble to include a token black man in the post room, which just looked anomalous now, showing by accident how much progress has been made in race relations. Wow, even the football pitch is joining the twentieth century nowadays, if not quite yet the twenty first.

But that was not the most obvious apartheid. Class reared its head all through the video. Shell did well not to include shots of the executive dining room, but it was still in existence, for forty years after the film was made. Progress there has come at last, but it took a long time.

And then there is gratuitous sexism, the most noticeable aspect of the video. Wendy is in a typing pool of girls. Her concerns are portrayed as how she can change for an evening out or secure some recreation rather than anything to do with her work. Admin staff are all “girls”, physical blue collar work is done by rough looking guys, and managers are invariably men, looking serious. That was the reality then. And you can see how the portrayal in films like this would have prolonged that reality. Feminism needed to be aggressive to shake things up enough to drive change.

In many countries we have since made great strides in tackling feminism, homophobia, racism and class stereotypes. Nonetheless we can be sure that it is not just John Terry (allegedly) and Luis Suarez who are lazily prolonging unacceptable current realities today. If a video were made of our daily lives now, and shown forty years from now, our behaviour would be exposed just like those from the 1960’s was, in ways we don’t even notice today.

Which brings me to my main point. The past has many lessons. But most of those lessons are not obvious from the vantage point of the past. The makers of the video were setting down something they thought would be interesting in the future, but the things that are interesting are not the things they envisaged.

That may be part of the reason why Deadlink fails. We record what we think people can learn. But by the time anyone is ready to learn, the context has changed and the relevant lessons are not those we envisaged.

This argues for a more random way of recording and accessing the past. Rather than just storing documents, we should somehow try to store experiences, without trying to judge the lessons.

Even five years ago, this was an impossible technical challenge. But with youtube and google, now we have the power to store so much more, and also access archives based on keywords. My guess is that this will revolutionise our ability to learn in a very short time, and competitive advantage will be available to those who can jump the queue.

Specific, targeted learning from looking back is much simpler. I don’t understand why companies do not insist more on post investment reviews. It also makes sense after any project to pull the team together to see what there is to learn. Few do it, and those that do always benefit. Perhaps it is not done because people let the emotional side take over. Someone trying to get a bonus or credit or shift blame can get these reviews a bad name very easily.

Another reason to look back occasionally is to celebrate progress. In my singing lessons, every so often I try to re-learn a song I studied some years before. This is always so good for morale, as the high notes and passages that used to cost me sleep invariably seem so much easier now. I have got better, and it is only this sort of thing that offers proof. Similarly, when we go to dancing class, I love to observe the end of the previous class. Often it is a group of a standard that we were a year ago, and don’t they seem slow! At the time, those steps were hard for us to, and it is good to see that and celebrate the progress we have made.

In singing and dancing these simple benchmarks are available, but in most aspects of our lives it is harder. Am I a better parent nowadays? I have no idea, and it would be hard to conceive of evidence to prove it one way or the other. Unless I had lots and lots of video clips, I suppose. Clips which the facebook generation may well have when it is their turn.

Living in the present is a good idea, but the past has its uses. The same technology that could revolutionise corporate learning is available to us as individuals. We should all take lots of photos and make lots of videos, and not just of things we think are interesting now. We can look at them later, and learn things, things we could not even contemplate now. Learning and celebrating are both good ideas.