Matt Moore picks up on Shawn’s recent post about the relevance of history and gives some good guidelines for appropriate use of history. Matt’s post reminded me of a HBR IdeaCast with Paul Saffo about effective forecasting. He says one of the big mistakes forecasters make is to use history for support (justification) rather than for illumination (understanding). He uses the example of the Iraq War, where the Bush administration and senior Pentagon officials studiously avoided looking at the Vietnam War by their own admission: “we lost that one – there is nothing to learn from it”. In effect, they cherry-picked history for the things that matched their preconceptions and desired results. This is the road to ruin. I loved this quote in the podcast:

Too often we use history like a drunk uses a lamp-post – for support rather than illumination.

As Matt points out, appropriate use of narrative helps us to avoid these issues because it focuses on the concrete and the particular, rather than the idealistic.