We may believe that there is an inherent value in experimenting with policy reforms: Even in the unfortunate event of a policy not delivering its promised benefits, policy-makers have learned a lesson that would allow them to turn future initiatives into a success story. Alastair Stark and Brian Head warn that such optimistic views on ‘organizational learning’ omit the reality of ‘organizational forgetting’. In their article “Institutional amnesia and public policy” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Alastair and Brian present evidence from interviews with 100 senior policy practitioners from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to highlight that policy-makers themselves consider institutional amnesia as a serious concern undermining the performance of public administrations. Alastair and Brian offer a multi-dimensional operationalization of institutional amnesia, hypothesise how amnesia affects various fields of policy-making, and discuss how its detrimental effects can be mitigated. Acknowledging that a concern about organizational forgetting has fallen through the cracks of scholarly interest before, Alastair and Brian emphasize that “remedies for memory-loss will only be found once policy scholars realize what policy practitioners already know – that we cannot afford to keep forgetting about institutional amnesia.”