I’ll age myself a bit here, but I remember at the beginning of each school year having to cover my school books with old shopping bags to protect them. One of my least favorite books to wrap was the history book…never really got into the subject…I was always more of a math/science guy.
Fast forward to today, my outlook on history has changed drastically. I’ve come to realize that you truly can’t move forward without looking back first. If you think about it, you do it every day and probably don’t even realize it. In the military, after we had an event, we would always do a “hotwash” and gather inputs on what went good and what didn’t go so well. We’d use those as lessons learned for the next time we did a similar event in the future. I remember every time an aircraft broke, the first question I asked is “what is the history on that aircraft for that particular system”? Even with my current company, every 2 weeks we have a team meeting to look back at the last 2-week event and discuss what went well and what didn’t go well or could use improvement.
I’ve talked about how we grow as leaders and people and how we change over the years. As we watch our bosses and their bosses and see what we like and don’t like, we make tweaks to how we do things.
So…whether you were a fan of history back in school or not…you are definitely doing 2 things today: 1) You will look back at some part of history to help guide you in a decision or groom who you are as a person or the team of people around you and 2) You will make history today! Those decisions you make, the person you become and the way you treat and grow your people will be looked backed at by somebody. Then they will use that to make decisions, groom themselves and their teams…and they cycle will repeat itself. History repeats itself…and it will never end. Remember that today and as always…have a great day!
Deliberate Development 