On March 23, Paul Kagame pointed to repeated mistakes, not as isolated errors, but as patterns that, over time, form culture.

When the same problems persist across people and years of discussion, the question is no longer what is happening, but where the pattern is coming from.

Most systems, whether governments, organizations, families, are built around the fear of mistakes.

People learn quickly that being wrong comes with consequences, such as judgment, low grades, loss of credibility, or even punishment. So they adapt, becoming careful and defaulting to safe decisions.

But “safe” rarely means effective. What often happens instead is that people will avoid making new mistakes by repeating old ones instead.

Not consciously; no one sets out to fail in the same way twice. But the subconscious mind is not rational. It does not prioritize success.

It prioritizes familiarity. And familiarity feels like control, which is a deep behavioral driver for many people. A mistake you already know carries less psychological risk than a decision you have never
made before.

The outcome may be poor, but at least it is predictable. You know how it unfolds, how to explain it. You may even know how to recover from it.

The unknown offers no such guarantees. So people choose what they know, even it does not work.
This is where the conversation about leadership often stays too shallow.

We talk about accountability, performance, systems, incentives. All of these matter, but they sit on top of
human conditioning. If the same issues persist across different individuals, then replacing people without addressing patterns will only reproduce the same results with new faces.

You cannot out-organize a pattern that lives inside people. And many of these patterns are formed long before someone steps into a leadership role.

Years of education that reward memorization over original thinking. Environments where deviation is corrected rather than explored.

Cultures where standing out carries risk, while blending in offers safety. Over time, this shapes how decisions are made. Innovation is not just a strategic challenge, but a psychological one.

Because doing something new requires stepping into the uncomfortable unknown. It requires making decisions without having all the answers.

It requires the willingness to be wrong in ways you have not been wrong before. It requires a kind of internal steadiness that many people have never had to develop. When we are not willing to do this, what happens instead?

Leaders defer upward, placing increasing pressure on those at the top to make calls that should have been handled elsewhere.

Teams default to what has been done before, even when they know it is insufficient. Conversations that could shift direction are left untouched because they
feel too uncomfortable to have.

And so the cycle continues. Not because people don’t care, but because they are operating within the limits of what feels psychologically tolerable.

You can see the same pattern outside of government and organizations. People stay in unhealthy routines even when they understand the long-term cost. They remain in relationships that no longer work rather than initiate difficult conversations.

They take on more than they should instead of setting boundaries that might create tension. In each case, familiar discomfort feels safer than unfamiliar change.

But while repetition may feel safe in the moment, it steadily compounds over time. What begins as a small avoidance becomes a pattern. The pattern becomes a norm. And eventually, the norm becomes a culture.

At that point, the problem is no longer visible as a series of individual decisions. It becomes “just the way things are.”

This is the deeper issue President Kagame was pointing to. And it raises uncomfortable questions not only relevant to the leaders in that room: Where are you repeating what you already know does not work?
Where are you avoiding a decision because you cannot predict the outcome?

Where are you choosing familiarity, not because it is effective, but because it is comfortable? Leadership is often measured by outcomes, but revealed in moments of discomfort.

The ability to move beyond repetition, to break a pattern rather than reinforce it, does not come from better intentions. It comes from awareness, and from the willingness to tolerate the discomfort of doing
something differently.

That is not a systemic shift, but a personal one. And it is available in every domain of life. If patterns can be learned, they can be unlearned.

If they can be repeated, they can be interrupted. But that requires something many people are not used to practicing: choosing the unfamiliar on purpose, and doing it consistently enough that it becomes the new pattern.

This is where real change begins. Not at the level of policy or structure, but at the level of decision. One different choice, made where it would be easier to repeat the old one.

The author is a transformational leadership coach and international TEDx speaker based here in Kigali.