Driving forwards just looking backwards?

I really like this article as it summarizes many of the problems with the hierarchical management approaches I see in larger clients:

Can you imagine getting into your car and trying to drive to work only looking out the back, not where you are going?  Terrifying thought, yet poor planning and communication means just that for many organizations – decisions are made purely on retrospective information (“fighting the last war”).

I’m currently setting up a new education programme in Nuclear Engineering, an area in which none of us can afford mistakes to be made – the driving philosophy is to teach engineers to think about what they are doing, not just mindlessly do as they are told.

In a completely different field recently, I saw a case in which  a design engineer had omitted a vital piece of information from a specification leading to a serious quality failure: when asked why, he retorted “Because the standard didn’t say I had to include it” – abdication of professional responsibility to mindless obedience.

In industry worldwide we employ a vast amount of brainpower and expertise, yet management usually spends much of its time suppressing it to maintain “control”. Paradoxically this means that the company has less control, because it has turned off the power steering, the headlights, the windscreen wipers and the brake servos.