Quote of the Day - 1/25/2012

History can’t give attention to what’s been lost, hidden, or deliberately buried; it is mostly a telling of success, not the partial failures that enabled success. - Scott Berkun in The Myths of Innovation

~~~~~

History is often taught in timeline fashion with milestones of wars as major drivers of change…and always written by the victor who throws away much of the context from the other side. We need more than the this kind of documentation to understand the how and why of the changes that occurred. Some changes were not driven by war at all.

We also should strive to remember that the perspective of the historian is always embedded in the telling; no one is totally objective. We can solve the problem of ‘single perspective’ by getting multiple viewpoints of the same events or time period. This is why we are intrigued by the connections that the ultimate success had to seemingly unrelated or partially related events. Check out James Burke’s Knowledge Web project site for an update on his work since the Connections television shows he created.

In your own personal history - think about your successes? Were there partial failures (or successes) that led to that success and do you include them in your personal history?