![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.memecon.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/neghands.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThrough appropriate interpretation, insights, such as knowledge about forgotten medical agents, can be brought back to life. A decisive role in reuse is played by the language, the transmission medium, and the context. These aspects are also valid of the flood of peer-reviewed, scientific publications (more than 2.5 million articles in 2018). What should we consider when we want to learn from past experiences?<\/p>\n
- \n
- Language reveals – though not everything<\/strong>
\nWe live with the illusion that convictions can be comprehensibly put into a linguistic form. This way, we oversee the fact that the expression formats cannot fully convey the actual meaning (see meta-model of language<\/a>).
\nThis is especially true for the signs and words used and the varying vocabulary of languages (jargons and translations) – for example, when the understanding of short, medium, and long term is shortened from one to ten years to one month to three years, it results in different effects. In the first case, the future can be jointly designed. In the second case, the workforce is always running after new directions without having any chance to participate.
\nHistorical statements can only be used by making assumptions. Although we can read the word\u2019s string, we do not know what was initially meant. Ancient Greeks distinguished project-like business activity for earning a living and financing leisure from physical slave labor. This no longer corresponds to our current view, which focuses on work-life balance. Today, the incentive to work (the work) arises intrinsically from the urge for recognition and self-affirmation and extrinsically from pecuniary and other monetary benefits. The longing for work-life balance is the attempt to replace the labor stresses with leisure activities (the life), not ease of mind. The inconveniences of work, the dependencies, external regulations, and incapacitations are supposed to compensate for these disadvantages of work with an exuberant calendar of spare time activities.
\nThe concepts of work and non-work have shifted repeatedly over the centuries – even in recent years with the agilization. Despite this, companies continue to adhere to the vertical and horizontal division of labor. With their outdated approaches, companies fail to introduce new leadership styles for the agile VUCA world<\/a>.<\/li>\n- The medium conveys – though not forever<\/strong>
\nThe longevity and availability of a medium determine whether conceptions stay visible. Inaccessible and protected from light, dry cave walls have preserved signs <\/a>and images<\/a> over forty thousand years – ceramic tablets last 5,000 years; books and manuscripts experience several centuries; films dissolve after 40 to 150 years. Just as most artifacts from the past have disappeared, our current media will disintegrate – optical storage media last five, 100, and in professional cases, 1000 years; hard drives and flash memory survive up to ten years. The lack of oral history means that most of the experiences disappeared due to the media\u2019s short shelf life. Even if they survive a long time, they must first be found and readable. Remember the Dead Sea Scrolls<\/a>, which were discovered after almost two thousand years.
\nAdditionally, the undocumented pieces of the puzzle are missing for a better understanding – the experiences that were not recorded and the lack of understanding of their creation context.
\nHandbooks provide general principles, but it would go beyond their scope to describe the related environment. Thus, the application with changing tasks is a mental transfer performance that is only possible with a lot of overhead. One example is the elaborate BPM of the eighties, which no longer fits today\u2019s rapidly changing activities.<\/li>\n- The context supports – although not everywhere <\/strong>
\nExperiences always arise in a specific environment. The authors always presuppose the understanding of the accompanying circumstances. Subsequently, they forget essential explanations of the context. As a result, the elaborated impressions remain misleading. Let us consider the rule of the people, the democracy, i.e., the population\u2019s participation in political resolutions. In ancient Greece, only so-called full citizens were involved in decisions – 10-20% of the inhabitants (i.e., Athenians who could fight, but no women, slaves, or foreigners). Today we understand democracy as the participation of the whole population, equal rights, majority decisions, etc. – at least in principle.
\nThe context is composed of different scopes (local, regional, continental, and global). The resulting mix is challenging to grasp – the New Yorker Manhattanite differs from the Californian San Franciscan, and at the same time, they share the American dream.
\nThe corresponding contexts are not provided and get lost over time. Today we try to establish this context with cultural studies, which is difficult because these contents are rarely described, and contemporaries can no longer be asked. Let us think about the design of processes according to the principles of Taylorism: there is one, best way; place and time are fixed; detailed structured tasks are pursued; one-way communication; small-scale targets without reference to corporate goals; third-party quality assurance. In the fast-moving world of VUCA<\/a>, these demands can no longer be realized due to the zero-latency reaction time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nBottom line: Due to the language limitations, the rarely available and problematic to understand evidence, and the lack of context, the prior experience can only be reused with great effort. Previous experiences are often used to get the target group to agree through the authority bias (i.e., the tendency to accept an authority\u2019s statement, regardless of its content, although one has a different opinion). Even Goethe proclaimed in Faust, \u201cFor what one has in black and white. One can carry home in comfort.\u201d With the flood of sources, experiences, and fake news, there are too many approaches that an objective choice of the \u201cright\u201d approach becomes impossible. For this reason, we have to make our own experiences – err, bearing mistakes, and try again until it works.<\/p>\n
- The medium conveys – though not forever<\/strong>