Continuing thread drift but not altogether away from the seat of the topic ...
Whilst working in the financial district of London in the late 1980s, I noticed the process of pensioning off the 'old farts' and promoting those in their 20s. It was done to save money and the idea that the new boys would have new ideas. What actually happened was that the companies lost the people who remembered what happened the last time it all went wrong.
Those times when the old geezer (RAF or commerce or politics) would scratch his head and say something like, "The last time
that happened, we found that the <ITEM> had failed and there is no warning light on it because it is supposed not to fail and just be replaced every 10,000 hours." Thus the problem was fixed and the new boy learnt a lesson.
In the mid 1990s, I heard a most interesting discussion about this from the head of Personnel (probably called Human Resources
) of a major UK finance group say on BBC R4, "We realised that, in letting go so many senior people, we had lost our 'corporate memory' of what happened before and we were having to learn lessons all over again."
QED.