You see this behaviour in countless situations. Political parties pull the "let's change leaders trick" because they remember the success of Hayden to Hawke or Peacock to Howard.  However. there are countless counter examples.

The New South Wales Labor Party understood this and apparently used a lotto machine to select their leaders for a while after Bob Carr.  The reason that worked before has no guarantee of working now is due to complexity.

There is too much that can and does change over time. Organisations containing leaders who have spent too long in airport lounge bookshops, spend millions trying to apply strategies that worked for JFK / Napoleon / Leonardo / someone famous only for cutting off all of their body parts to escape from a lift door.

While tales of derring-do by these fine folk may serve to inspire others to crave success, slavishly copying what are assumed to be their strategies is mistaken. Why? Because these leaders are charged with selling hand dryers to hotels, they are not running the US in a cold war, nor are they invading large parts of Europe.

In other words, a moment's reflection should be sufficient for these wannabe warriors to appreciate that their circumstances are subtly different to a sulking French general stuck in a muddy field and who can't get out of his wellingtons.

Complexity means that differences both small and large between one situation and another make predicting what is likely to happen a mug's game. Too much of business leadership education continues to rely on the case study, where the entrails of a famous leader, or a major crisis are picked over, in an attempt to draw out principles that can be discerned in the pattern.

However, this approach fails to appreciate that a key element of complexity is that while patterns emerge from the complex interaction of multiple different influences, those patterns very commonly cannot be discerned or predicted in advance, but can only be appreciated after the fact. The principle of the butterfly effect is that very small changes in initial conditions between the first and second "runs" of a system can lead to completely different outcomes.

This explains why doing the same thing in situations that seem broadly similar can have such unpredictable outcomes. If we want to be successful and robust, or even anti-fragile, it is a better strategy to learn how to continually do different things, to build upon, but not repeat the past, and to learn how to take retrievable risks, and how to rapidly regroup after set-backs and take advantages of unexpected opportunities.

If we are going to repeat anything, let it be that we repeat not repeating what we have done in the past.  Do I have to repeat that?

Jim Bright is professor of career education and development at ACU and a partner at Bright and Associates. Email opinion@jimbright.com. Follow @DrJimBright.