About Retained Learnings

Retained Learnings began with a simple observation: institutions rarely fail without warning. The signs are usually visible long before the crisis arrives. Controls weaken gradually, incentives drift, uncomfortable questions go unasked, and lessons that should have been learned quietly fade from memory. By the time failure becomes obvious, the conditions that made it possible have often existed for years.

This publication explores those patterns through essays on governance, accountability, history and human nature. Some pieces examine failures of oversight and ethics within organisations. Others look to history, searching for the recurring behaviours that continue to shape societies despite centuries of experience. The objective is not to catalogue mistakes, but to understand why they happen, why they repeat, and what they reveal about the institutions we build and the people who inhabit them.

The publication is organised around two continuing series. Who Will Guard the Guards? examines why institutions so often become incapable of preventing the very abuses they were created to stop. Doomed to Repeat looks to history and human nature in search of an answer to a different question: why, despite all that the past has taught us, do we remain so determined not to learn from it?

Retained Learnings is ultimately driven by optimism rather than cynicism. It is founded on the belief that institutions can improve, that history has lessons worth retaining, and that understanding failure is one of the surest ways of preventing it.