Guidelines for the future based on the past

There is a fundamental problem with management research, the whole field takes for granted that you can build the future by applying guidelines extracted from the past. Design research often tends to do the same, and the results can only be mediocre.

Here is an example from: Hayagreeva Rao and Robert Sutton: How Do You Scale Excellence?: "they interviewed business leaders, reviewed research, and studied and conducted case studies "
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/hayagreeva-rao-robert-sutton-how-do-you-scale-excellence

I won't list here everything that is wrong with such assumption, and of course it is valuable to learn from the past. Just imagine if in creativity, innovation and design people were making decisions based on what leaders say in interviews and what case studies showed to be successful in the past. Who in their right mind would think that repeating the same decisions would make sense in the future?