Corporate Amnesia: Why Companies Keep Repeating the Same Mistakes

We live in an age where access to knowledge is near-instant, but actual learning is rarer than ever. Companies pride themselves on being data-driven, yet they continue to fall for the same traps, recycle failed strategies, and rebuild broken systems with new labels.

The problem is not memory loss. It is the deliberate erosion of memory, a systemic refusal to look at reality, to learn, and to record truth.

Corporate amnesia is not caused by a lack of tools or processes. Its root cause is always the same: disconnection from reality, spread across every layer of the organisation. We previously explored how individuals lose touch with the truth. Here, we extend that diagnosis to the system itself: leadership retreats into vision decks, teams decorate poor execution with narrative, and the organisation as a whole becomes addicted to the comfort of illusion.

The Root Cause: Disconnection at Every Level

From top to bottom, many organisations operate behind a lens designed to beautify dysfunction. Leadership tells itself flattering stories. Teams craft narratives to justify failure. Dashboards are tuned to confirm bias. Strategy reviews become theatre. Performance reviews reward noise.

Reality becomes unbearable, so it is reinterpreted. Smoothed. Filtered. Narrated. And in alignment with our previous reflection on cultural decay, we must accept the outcome: when truth cannot be spoken honestly, the only thing we can expect is programmed obsolescence.

The consequence? Organisations cannot remember what went wrong because they never allowed themselves to face it in the first place.

The Dopamine Trap: The Swipe Society in the Workplace

In a consumption-driven culture, employees unconsciously seek the novelty hit. The launch, the pivot, the rebrand, these are exciting. Learning, by contrast, is slow, painful, and invisible. So they reset the game:

• New initiative
• New team name
• New OKRs

Instead of reviewing lessons, they crave the adrenaline of the blank slate.

And when it fails? Blame is outsourced. Old patterns return. The cycle restarts.

Worse still, many organisations develop subcultures where praise becomes the only acceptable currency. Criticism is seen as sabotage. Questions are treated as friction. Celebration becomes mandatory, introspection discouraged. Originally stemming from good intentions, borrowed, often, from Anglo-Saxon HR ideology, this culture morphs into a fragile theatre where reputation matters more than delivery.

In such an environment, institutional learning stands no chance. It is not just forgotten. It is actively suppressed.

Comfort as an Anaesthetic: The Oyster Reflex

Learning requires exposure. Yet many modern professionals seek safety over clarity. As Gad Saad described in The Parasitic Mind, people develop cognitive antibodies against discomfort.

It is easier to stay in the comfort zone:

• Stay silent in retrospectives
• Rewrite history in the next kickoff
• Disown responsibility by playing oyster: head buried, mouth shut, eyes closed

Discomfort is numbed. Responsibility is diffused. Nothing is learned. Worse, this passivity leads to an inversion of values, where those who raise concerns, voice risks, or question the dominant narrative are labelled as troublemakers. The people who try to protect the system are often treated as the problem.

When truth becomes unwelcome, it is the messenger who is punished. And when you punish the messenger, you become the ultimate myopic system, blind to reality, deaf to feedback, and destined to fail by your own hand. But who cares? The culture of blame ensures someone else will take the fall. The virus moves on.

As Agent Smith says in The Matrix, "Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague." The analogy fits: this mentality spreads from company to company, contaminating environments with learned helplessness, strategic denial, and systemic decay. Individuals who carry this mindset replicate it wherever they land, leaving dysfunction in their wake and making real transformation almost impossible without a full immune response from leadership.

The 90/10 Dilemma: When the Passive Shape the Path

Jordan B. Peterson suggests that in most systems, 10% of people carry the mission forward while 90% follow. In corporate life, the 90% are not just passive. They often shape the decision process.

This creates a dangerous paradox:

• Those who remember, question, and build are outnumbered.
• Those who forgot, conformed, and performed gain control.

The result? Strategic incoherence. Memory collapse. Decisions made by people who do not remember what they are undoing. And yet, this imbalance creates confusion: how could 90% be wrong? The answer lies in blindness to reality. Even when the 10% leave, or are pushed out, the system continues to fail. But the failure is never attributed to the loss of clarity. Instead, blame shifts. Denial deepens. And the illusion remains intact. Or worse, the blame is placed on the 10% who departed. Fragility always follows the path of least resistance: it is easier to accuse the uncomfortable than to confront the uncomfortable truth.

When It Has Already Happened – Cases of Strategic Amnesia

This is not theoretical. Corporate amnesia has already hollowed out some of the most iconic names in tech.

Yahoo – The Comatose Reinventor
A once-dominant force on the internet, Yahoo cycled through leadership teams and strategies throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Each brought a new vision, a fresh rebrand, and no accountability for past failures. Institutional memory was treated as baggage. Criticism was ignored. Talent exited. With no continuity of learning, Yahoo became a graveyard of abandoned plans and forgotten lessons.

Nokia – The Blind Giant
In the late 2000s, Nokia still led the mobile industry but remained convinced that its internal platforms, like Symbian, could resist the smartphone disruption. Engineers who foresaw the tidal shift were sidelined or dismissed. Truth was drowned in legacy pride. By the time Nokia attempted a reset, it was too late. Denial had calcified. The 10% who could have shifted the tide were long gone.

The Limits of Change: You Cannot Heal What Refuses to Change

You cannot change what does not want to be changed. Transformation does not depend on slogans, budgets, or frameworks: it depends on willingness. Mindset shifts only happen in environments where a critical mass of people genuinely want to learn, rebuild, and confront the truth.

But consider the reality of the 10% ratio. Even among those who carry the mission, fear and fatigue spread quickly. Some grow silent, not out of indifference, but self-preservation. They know that pushing too hard can cost them their job, their health, even their identity.

The decision to engage, or to step back, is never trivial. It is a moral choice. Because being part of the 10% takes a toll. The pressure of clarity in a fog of denial is exhausting.

The real tragedy of corporate amnesia is not that systems forget. It is that those who remember are often destroyed by their attempt to help.

So the question becomes: Is it worth dying for a lost cause? Failure is a lesson like any other. And sometimes, the only lesson left is this: you are only delaying failure by staying. Walking away is not surrender. It is recognition. Sometimes, the bravest act is not to save the system, but to refuse to join its decay, and save yourself.

Memory Is Not a Process. It Is a Discipline.

You do not remember because you have Jira. You remember because you write, reflect, disagree, and correct.

Institutional memory requires:

• Friction in decision-making
• Post-mortems with teeth
• Protection of dissenters
• Rewarding those who warn

Without this, the only memory left is myth. Rebranding mediocrity. Celebrating iteration over reflection. Confusing reinvention with wisdom.

What you delay today will collapse tomorrow. Systems that cannot remember will die repeating themselves, no matter how well they decorate the fall.