Why Organizations Have No Monuments To Their Failures (And Whether They Should)
A question I can’t answer
War memorials are paradoxical. They are symbols of remembrance that stand in serenity and symmetry for memorializing wars that were anything but.
If war was all screams and horrifying brutal deaths, why do we remember it through stillness and serenity?
Perhaps because peace is the only way we can bear to look back. We can’t live in a perpetual replay of horror, so we translate pain into form, and form into meaning. That’s how the painful memory of war survives without destroying us.
But what strikes me is that we build monuments to war to reflect on loss: of life, of economy, of spirit, of what we held dear.
Yet we build nothing equivalent for organizational struggle.
We have no rituals for honoring failed projects. Bad hires that shredded the organizational culture. No record of the restructurings that broke people and put the company in a downward spiral. No annual gathering where we remember what was lost…and what we held special at one time. When something difficult happens (a layoff, a strategic pivot that kills years of work, losing your biggest client) we hold one retrospective. People ask questions. They take notes. Then it disappears. Forever. In the corporate black hole where emails generally go to die.
Business culture has decided that remembrance is inefficient. We debrief once and move forward.
And yet. I find myself questioning if this forgetting is a feature or a bug.
There is a wise saying by Heraclitus, that no man steps in the same river twice. It’s not the same river, and it’s not the same man anymore.
Organizations are rivers too, you see.
The company five years from now won’t be the same company: different people, different leadership, different challenges. Why burden them with old wounds?
And yet, I feel that some moments for an organization are too important to simply flow past. I was at the awe-inspiring India Gate in New Delhi when this became somewhat evident to me. What struck me most were the names. Thousands of them, each one carved into stone. For eternity. Not “13,313 soldiers died” as a statistic, but individual names. Individual lives. Someone took the effort to inscribe each one. It was moving to say the least.
War memorials like India Gate suggest that some things are too important to forget. That memory requires physical space, and permanence so that people return to see what was lost, in the hope of never repeating it.
But what rises to that level in the life of an organization?
Losing one of the biggest customers? The people who lived it know the effort to grow that relationship, and irreparable financial setback that followed after losing the client. But five years later, new employees won’t know and perhaps don’t need to. The organization has moved on. Should it really carry that weight?
Mass layoffs from misreading the market? The people who were let go remember. The ones who stayed remember. But preserving that pain: does it create accountability or just resentment? Does it build wisdom or trap people in old grievances?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that there is a cost to remembering and a cost to forgetting, and we have somehow chosen forgetting. Almost by default.
When we forget, we lose the nugget of wisdom embedded in failure. We lose institutional knowledge. We lose the trust that comes from honest acknowledgment.
But when we remember with the kind of permanence that war memorials stand for, we perhaps risk other things. We risk becoming a culture that can’t move forward, that rehashes old battles, that makes new people feel like outsiders to a history they didn’t live. We risk using memory as a weapon rather than wisdom.
So I’m left grappling with this predicament: What in organizational life is worth memorializing, and what should we let the river carry away?
I genuinely don’t know what that looks like in practice. But I know the cost of never asking the question.
Choose Meaning Over Metrics
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Deeply reflective and will indeed resonate with the ones that have lost, stumbled, failed, hurt etc. In a way, what you are referring to is is like grieving, I think. Grieving to lament a loss is not productive. Grieving to remember a legacy and to act on lessons is productive.
As such, what may we grieve about that supports growth?
Culture is one that I can think of. If I recall right, Apple lost its culture when Steve Jobs was let go and then found it back again when Steve returned. So Culture is fundamental that is worth grieving to recall powefully and reaffirm in a way it aligns with values of the organization and guides strategic imperatives. (I am including values and ethics under culture).
What should we not dwell on? Laurels, metrics... (meaning over metrics, see what I did there?). They are all transient and only points in time.
So, grieve or reflect on what is transcendental. Let go of the rest.