It’s only a poor memory that works backwards

What do Shakespeare, Ricoeur, and robodebt have in common? A reminder that leadership is about how we remember — and what future we make from it.

First published in The Mandarin

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”

The White Queen, Through the Looking-Glass

In government, learning from the past is a ritualised expectation. Royal commissions, integrity inquiries, and lessons-learned reviews all signal the enduring faith in reflection as a path to reform. 

Public institutions carry the accumulated memory of precedent and practice, the sediment of reforms that have succeeded and failed, and the cultural patterns of a bureaucracy shaped over a century of democratic governance.

This institutional memory is often seen as a stabilising force. It ensures continuity across political cycles, guards against repeated errors, and helps preserve the coherence of the public realm. 

But what kind of memory is this, exactly? 

Over the past decade, Australia has seen royal commissions into aged care, natural disasters, disability, veteran suicide, and the now-infamous robodebt scheme. Audit offices, both federal and state, have repeatedly flagged issues with decision-making and implementation. The pattern is familiar: a failure occurs, an inquiry follows, and the institution vows to do better next time.

Are these lessons learned or lessons observed?

The question is not just whether we remember, but how we remember and what remembering changes. Literature, philosophy, and history can offer the public sector a deeper understanding of how learning from the past shapes the future.

How we inhabit time

Time, for most of us, moves in a straight line: past, present, future. Memory naturally looks backward. But for philosophers and writers, memory is not a record of what happened; it is an act of meaning-making, always shaped by where we stand now and what we hope or fear lies ahead.

The White Queen’s whimsical observation — that it’s a poor memory that only works backwards — comes from a deeper philosophical tradition. One that recognises memory as both retrospective and prospective, serving as a hinge between history and imagination, the past and the future.

No writer explores this more deeply than Shakespeare. His plays unfold across intricate timelines: inherited conflicts, foretold fates, and the question of how the past either limits or enables the future. He recognised that memory is not just a passive experience. It is political.

Shakespeare and the futures in the past

In Henry IV and Henry V, Shakespeare traces Prince Hal’s journey as he evolves from a reckless heir into a national hero. However, this transformation goes beyond personal growth; it also marks a narrative shift. He needs to reinterpret his father’s usurpation, crafting a new sense of legitimacy from the fragile foundation of rebellion. He must reshape the past to create a viable future.

In Henry V, the past is examined, the future is envisioned, critics are confronted, loyalties are tested, and outcomes are secured. But none of this is predetermined. The past becomes useful not through repetition, but through reimagining. It transforms, in the hands of a leader, into a resource rather than a constraint.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur captures this idea in a single phrase: “the unfulfilled potential of the past.” He argues that history is not a catalogue of completed events but rather a reservoir of lost possibilities, missed chances, and latent alternatives. Some of these are recoverable, while others serve as cautionary tales. 

Any senior executive who has sat with a royal commission report knows this feeling. When the facts and events are laid out in sequence, it becomes clear when and how a different, often minor, action could have led to a different outcome.  

The regret of missed opportunities often marks our experience of leadership. 

Shakespeare’s plays don’t just depict what happened; they model how futures are made through the act of remembering differently. Leaders who cultivate a forward-looking memory learn to interpret the past in a way that allows for different futures. 

The historian and the leader

The historian E.H. Carr famously wrote that “the facts speak only when the historian calls on them.” In his view, history is not a neutral record but an interpretive act, shaped by the questions we bring to it. Facts matter, but they do not arrange themselves. Someone must choose which to highlight, how to frame them, and what story they are made to tell.

This idea applies just as much to leadership as it does to history. Public service leaders are constantly interpreting. They draw on past experiences, institutional precedents, and bureaucratic lore to inform their decisions in the present. 

When we talk about institutional memory, we are not accessing an objective archive of neatly laid-out ‘lessons learned’. We are engaging in an act of interpretation.

To lead, then, is not just about knowing what has happened. It involves deciding what is important and how the interpretation of the past may guide or constrain what comes next.

Against retrospective determinism

The historian Dominick LaCapra warned of the danger of “retrospective determinism”—the belief that because something happened, it had to happen. This mindset is common in public service post-mortems: the idea that failures were inevitable once all the facts are laid out and hindsight is vigorously applied.

But hindsight is not a neutral lens. It is a reconstruction, and it can easily slide into fatalism. 

If we assume that every policy failure was preordained, we lose the ability to imagine alternatives. We replace judgment with resignation, and we risk building institutions that excel at rationalising the past instead of creating the future.

LaCapra suggests something more generative: a willingness to explore “alternative possibilities in the past suggested by the retrospective or deferred effects of later knowledge.” This isn’t about rewriting history; it’s about refusing to view it as though it’s closed.

 It’s about recognising that different decisions were possible and, based on what has been learned, still might be.

The work of institutional memory

Public institutions encode institutional memory in procedures, risk frameworks, reporting lines, and norms. Over time, this memory becomes internalised. It is habitual, cultural, and resistant. When we say ‘this is how we’ve always done it,’ memory is a constraint, not a resource.

The challenge for leadership is to keep institutional memory alive. That means treating it not as an archive but as a site of ongoing interpretation. It requires a willingness to revisit assumptions, question stories, and ask not only what happened, but what was possible. 

The robodebt royal commission made this painfully clear. It was not just a reckoning with unlawful practices; it was an inquiry into institutional memory and practice. The Commission’s work was not only a retrospective review of the facts, but for public service leaders, it also served as a starting point to see things from a different perspective.

Leadership as interpretation

Too often, leadership in the public sector is framed as a bureaucratic and technical role that involves managing processes, delivering outcomes, and ensuring compliance. But public service leadership is also interpretive. It is the art of making sense of helping institutions see the world differently so that they can act differently.

This is why memory matters, not as a database of lessons observed, but a source of imagination, not as a record, but as raw material.

Shakespeare understood this. Carr understood it. Ricoeur did, too. Each, in their own way, warned against the complacency that comes with thinking the past is finished. For Carr, the past was an argument. For Ricoeur, it was unfinished. For Shakespeare, it was human behaviour.

The White Queen’s paradox still holds: a memory that only works backwards is of little use. The memory we need recalls what might have happened and helps us imagine a better future.