You Can Learn A Lot From A Dummy

Over breakfast one morning, a friend used a phrase I hadn’t heard in a while. In the 1980s, Vince and Larry burst onto TV screens across the U.S. Through humorous dialogue and endings that always included Vince and Larry going through the windshield, they encouraged us to “Buckle Up” for safety. Then the narrator would say, “You could learn a lot from a dummy.” Vince and Larry were crash test dummies.

My friend and I were talking about leadership and mentoring but had drifted to the general concept that it was much easier on your mind, body, and soul to learn from others’ mistakes as opposed to finding everything out “the hard way.” We both acknowledged being guilty of attending the school of hard knocks from time to time. We also felt the pain of our children, friends, and team members when they failed to learn the lessons taught by other people’s failures.

Vicarious Learning Deficit, Historical Amnesia, or Experiential Learning Bias are terms used to describe the failure to learn from observing others’ experiences, forgetting, ignoring lessons from the past, or only trusting lessons learned from direct personal experience. Whatever you call it, it is hard on an individual but far more detrimental to a leader.

Yet here we are, watching leaders crash through windshields over and over again—making the same mistakes that destroyed their predecessors, ignoring the hard-won wisdom scattered across corporate graveyards, and somehow believing they are different.

Overconfidence bias is the most dangerous culprit. Success breeds a particular kind of amnesia. When you’ve won before, it becomes easier to dismiss others’ failures as irrelevant. “That could never happen to us. We’re smarter. We’re different.” I’ve watched previously successful leaders assume their past victories would immunize them from similar mistakes. The tech industry is littered with companies that ignored obvious lessons from others’ spectacular crashes—dismissing digital transformation as a fad even as they watched competitors get disrupted.

Group identity creates another layer of blindness. “Those failures happened to them, not us,” becomes the refrain. Our group is special. Our circumstances are unique. When automotive executives dismissed Tesla because “we know cars better than some tech company,” they chose tribal comfort over inconvenient truth. Leaders surrounded by people who think alike create echo chambers where outside examples feel irrelevant.

The difficulty in tracing cause and effect provides convenient excuses. When Blockbuster collapsed, was it streaming, late fees, physical stores, or some combination? This causal ambiguity becomes a shield: “Their situation was completely different from ours.” Smart leaders cut through this fog by focusing on patterns rather than perfect parallels, asking not “Could this exact scenario happen to us?” but “What forces created these conditions, and are similar forces at work here?”

Lack of institutional memory compounds the problem. Companies that survived previous downturns forget the lessons that got them through. The people who lived through the learning eventually leave, and their replacements inherit outcomes without understanding the journey. I’ve seen family businesses where the founder’s hard-won lessons about cash flow get forgotten by the next generation, leaving them vulnerable to problems already solved decades earlier.

The curse of knowledge works in reverse—new leaders, unaware of why certain safeguards exist, “streamline” them away and repeat experiments that failed before. Organizations become brittle in exactly the ways that destroyed their predecessors.

The costs compound over time. Leaders who can’t learn vicariously don’t just miss opportunities to avoid mistakes; they put their people through unnecessary trauma. Every lesson learned “the hard way” means someone on their team experienced avoidable stress, disappointment, and career damage.

The antidote isn’t heroic individual effort; it’s building systems that make learning from others’ examples natural. The best leaders conduct structured debriefs after studying others’ failures, asking “What would this look like if it were happening to us?” They institutionalize devil’s advocate processes, designating someone to argue why their strategy might fail based on patterns from other organizations. They actively seek diverse perspectives from outside their industry who can spot patterns that expertise blinds them to.

Most importantly, the best leaders create cultural norms that reward acknowledging and learning from failure—both their own and others’. Instead of celebrating only success, they celebrate the wisdom to avoid repeating others’ mistakes. They make “learning from dummies” a competitive advantage rather than an admission of weakness.

The crash test dummies taught us that you don’t have to go through the windshield to learn that seatbelts save lives. In leadership, we don’t have to crash our organizations to learn the lessons that destroyed others. After all, we really can learn a lot from a dummy, especially if we’re smart enough not to be one ourselves. If we’re humble enough to admit we’re not that different, wise enough to study the patterns, and disciplined enough to turn others’ hard-won wisdom to our advantage, we can learn from anyone—even a dummy—the Bison Way.