As much as we applauded former Time-Warner CEO Gerald Levin for owning up to his mistakes in relation to the disastrous merger with AOL, this column in the New York Times describes a situation with the Fed that is far more typical of what happens in the business world. The Fed is lobbying for greater of the financial system to prevent future crises, but isn’t acknowledging that it missed the housing bubble—and miss it the Fed did, as the columnist demonstrates by citing the reassuring statements Fed officials repeatedly made about the housing market. Even worse, the Fed doesn’t seem to be trying to understand why it missed the bubble. Without that knowledge, how can the Fed possibly do a better job next time?

The issues at the Fed seem to mirror the problems that occur in businesses. The Times says Fed officials got caught in an echo chamber, where all the reassuring comments about the housing market overwhelmed the signs that problems were, in fact, developing. This is the kind of thing that happens all the time in setting corporate strategy. Once a leader says he think something is a good idea, the team tries to find ways of making it work and may gloss over potential problems.

We agree with the columnist’s recommendation that the Fed needs to bring in independent analysts from time to time, but we’d go a step further. The Times suggests a body akin to the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates airplane crashes to provide an objective determination of why they occurred. In the case of the financial system, though, why wait until after another crash? There are already plenty of lessons from previous ones that could allow for better regulation. Having done so much research into corporate disasters, we’ve seen the power that comes from knowing what the common mistakes are. We’ve also seen how straightforward it is for independent advisers to provide perspective that can head off problems. Why not have such advisers come in every year or so at the Fed and prepare a list of scenarios that could lead to financial crisis?

Fed officials could take steps to head off the crises. If they don’t see a problem percolating, they would have to make specific predictions about what they thought would occur in each highlighted sector—housing prices, certain types of bonds, or whatever. If, as the weeks and months went by, results diverged significantly from the Fed’s predictions, they’d have signals that maybe a problem was emerging after all. This is the kind of exercise that let Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase largely get out of the mortgage market before the collapse and positioned them to outrun the rest of Wall Street ever since. Why not the Fed, too?

Then there might be no need for a post mortem.