In July 2004, the 9/11 Commission published its final report. The investigation entailed reviewing more than 2.5 million pages of documents, interviewing more than 1,200 people in 10 countries and conducting 19 days of public hearings. In other words, the United States government had to spend nearly three years reconstructing a coherent account of what it had known, what it had done and the data points it had failed to connect before Sept. 11. Since fall 2001, the national vow has been to never forget. The uncomfortable lesson from the Commission is that, in important ways, we already had.
Much of the 9/11 story is understandably told as a failure of coordination. Information existed in different places, warnings moved through different agencies and no one assembled enough of the pieces into a complete picture. But there was another problem, and it ran backward through time. The idea of using an airplane as a weapon was not wholly unprecedented. The failed 1995 Bojinka plot would have involved crashing an explosive-laden aircraft into CIA headquarters. Other intelligence during the 1990s raised similar possibilities. A regional sector of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) had even simulated a foreign hijacked airliner crashing into a building in the United States as part of a training exercise scenario (though this had no connection to any specific intelligence related to the 9/11 plot). The raw material was there, but the institution just didn’t know what it already knew.
The Commission famously characterized the attacks, in part, as a failure of imagination. But experts had imagined such a scenario, and imagination rarely begins with a blank sheet of paper. It begins with context, experience, patterns and things that have happened before. If an organization cannot find, understand and apply its own experience, that makes it a lot harder for it to imagine what could come next. It would be comforting to treat this as an intelligence community problem. Unfortunately, organizational history suggests otherwise.
When NASA History Repeated Itself
After Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry in 2003, killing all seven crew members, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued its report. One chapter carried a remarkable title: “History as a Cause.” The investigation found that some of the organizational conditions behind the Columbia disaster echoed problems identified after the Challenger disaster 17 years earlier. The lessons learned from Challenger had, in the board’s words, “to a large degree been forgotten.”
An official investigation into a catastrophic failure concluded that organizational forgetting was part of the causal chain. A large piece of foam insulating material was the proximate physical cause of the Columbia tragedy, but sitting upstream were assumptions, behaviors and decision-making patterns the organization had encountered before. NASA had learned the lesson, but as time and people moved on, the institution lost access to it. These were exceptionally capable people working in one of the most technically sophisticated organizations on Earth. That’s the part any leader managing a complex organization should find unsettling—because if NASA can forget, your organization can too.
When the Fed Remembered
There is a useful counterexample. In 1963, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz published “A Monetary History of the United States.” For many, this seminal work may be Ambien in narrative form. For economists, it’s like “Gray’s Anatomy.” Among its most consequential arguments was that Federal Reserve policy had significantly worsened the Great Depression. In 2002, Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke spoke at an event honoring Friedman’s 90th birthday. Referring to Friedman and Schwartz’s argument about the Depression, Bernanke said: “Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”
Four years later, Bernanke became chairman of the Federal Reserve. Then came 2008. Whatever your view of the policy choices that followed, the Fed’s response was dramatically different from its response during the early years of the Great Depression. It was not a response invented from scratch over a frantic weekend in a board room. It was informed by decades of scholarship, institutional debate and a historical record that leaders had studied. In other words, the Fed had memory available before the crisis. The 9/11 Commission and the Columbia investigation largely reconstructed memory after the fact.
When Memory Leaves the Room
“Never forget” is an admirable promise, but the sentiment is the easy part. That isn’t a commentary on anyone’s desire or willingness to remember. Twenty-five years later, more than 100 million Americans were either born after that day or were too young to remember it. They simply do not have the firsthand experience and context that those of us who lived through that time have.
I was a young professional in Chicago that morning, in town for client meetings, staying in a hotel across the street from the Sears Tower. I was on a conference call with colleagues, and the television was on in my room, so I was the one who told them a plane had hit the first tower. We ended the meeting when the second one hit. When the news reported that the Sears Tower was being evacuated, I frantically bolted from the hotel to the train station, which was already filled with soldiers, and made my way to family in Michigan where I stayed until I could fly back east to go home.
Firsthand memory does not transfer on its own, including inside organizations. People retire. Leaders move on. Teams reorganize. Technologies change. Files disappear. Context fades. The people who were in the room eventually aren’t. Institutional forgetting is not evidence of moral failure. It’s the natural condition of organizations, which means remembering requires active effort and management.
Capture institutional knowledge before leaders leave. Preserve the records that explain not only what decisions were made but why. Connect historical experience to current strategy. Build systems that allow people and AI to find reliable information without requiring an archaeological expedition. And when leadership changes, transfer memory with the same seriousness with which you transfer authority.
Most institutions already know more than they can access. What gets lost is rarely the information. It is the ability to find the part that matters while it still matters. That work is quiet and always early. It never seems urgent until the day it was.