The old horse knew the way

Duke Huan of Qi went to attack a state in the north and got lost coming home. Mountains, no roads, winter. The army was in serious trouble.

Guan Zhong said: the old horses know the way. Let them go in front and follow them.

They released the old horses, followed them, and found the road.

It's an odd story to keep for two thousand years, because it says almost nothing about intelligence. The army had strategists, maps, a duke. What they lacked was memory of this particular pass, and the only creature carrying that memory was a horse too old to be useful in a battle.

That's the whole content of the story: the knowledge you need in a bad moment is often held by something you were about to discard.

Think about who knows how this process actually runs, whose hands have done it a hundred times, whose body remembers the stairwell. Then think about how your organisation treats that person when a reorganisation comes.

Experienced people aren't always right. But the questions they ask are questions you'll wish you'd asked earlier.

If you're the one with the old knowledge, notice when you're the only horse in the valley. That's not a safe position to be in, and it's better to write things down than to be indispensable in a crisis.

MOJOWAY's client file is partly for this. It holds what happened last time, so the lesson survives the person who learned it.