To which I ask “if everybody before you has jumped off the bridge, would you follow?” Yup, we’ve always done it this way is one of my pet peeves. I believe there is a time and place for everything, and things/circumstances do change.

Organizational memory is a valuable asset for the firm. It is defined as shared data, information or knowledge of past experiences that are relevant to an organization’s present activities. As such, it lives in the collective memory of the employees and evolves with them. Improvement in the overall effectiveness and success of the organization is dependent on the quality of its memory and how well it learns from the past. Yet, organizations routinely “forget” what they have done in the past and why they have done it, which reminds me of the classic Thanksgiving turkey story:

A teenager was watching her mom carefully stuff and prepare the turkey for the oven. As part of the preparation, prior to putting the turkey into the oven, mom cut about 3″ from the tail of the bird. When the teenager asked why that was, mom simply said “I don’t know… Mom always did it this way. Why don’t you ask your grandmother?”. Later on that night at the dinner table, the teen queried grandma, to which she responded “Well you see… My oven was too small, so in order to fit my 20lb turkey, I always had to cut off about 3″ from the tail.”

Yup, things and circumstances usually do change… Alzheimer-like poor organizational memory usually results from a lack of leadership focus on learning from past success and failures, and where the organizational processes do not require employees to document and share organizational actions, outcomes, and to apply those learnings to new problems. The information overload that we experience daily certainly makes the problem more challenging to deal with. As the firm heavily relies on individuals to be the keeper of organizational experience, turnover, attrition and downsizing eventually erodes precious knowledge, learnings and insights. With that, effective organizational memory is compromised of three parts:

1. Explicit knowledge, information, facts, policies or rules that are embodied within the culture;
2. Tacit knowledge, insights, knowledge of the rationale, discussions, assumptions behind those explicit knowledge and information that is shared and understood by the organization;
3. Application of this knowledge, recognition of the knowledge, its context and successful internalization, associations and utilization of the knowledge by the organization;

Basically, you need to be able to move from “we’ve always done it that way”, to be able to share why, how and other relevant context, to successfully recognize how those experiences might be relevant to a new problem or that the circumstances have changed and it’s time for an update.

Companies heavily rely on groupware tools (wikis, Microsoft Sharepoint, …) to capture and manage their organizational memory. Given that the organizational memory lives as part of the collective memory of the employees, you can see the challenges associated with managing a living organism. However, the real competitive advantage comes from the application of this knowledge within the appropriate context of the new problem that needs to be solved. So, unless the organization successfully fires on all three cylinders and builds a learning organization, it will not be effective at utilizing their collective knowledge for new ideas, inventions or innovations.

If you think your organization is suffering from (hopefully) a temporary case of amnesia, here are some suggestions to improve the overall effectiveness of your organization’s memory.

• Formalize processes for creating and using organizational memory. This includes holding project postmortems where you capture the learnings, but also a specific action plan that would be applicable to the overall organization as well as next project. And, make it part of your project initiation phase to review prior postmortem reports.
• Build a learning organization by insisting on learning from past success and failures. As with life, learning is multi-dimensional, it is individual and collective. So, be inclusive and encouraging in your learning process.
• Make it easy for the organization to capture the knowledge by investing in tools to easily capture, catalog and organize knowledge and information being exchanged. However, focus on building a learning culture by putting in processes that requires connection with the rationale and assumptions of past decisions and learn from it in a way that would be applied to today’s problems.
• Continuously expand on the organization’s memory and experience. New knowledge can be gained through customer surveys, tradeshows, hiring people with relevant experience, … You can utilize your vision, your core competencies and strategic objectives as a method for determining where you want to enhance your learnings.
• Remember, people are fallible and our memories are flawed. As you remember and apply past learnings, make sure it is within the context of the new problems. Otherwise, you are dealing with apples vs. oranges.
• As with anything you want to improve, focus on measuring your initiatives. This can be simply implemented as assessment surveys, utilization of knowledge management and collaboration tools and measures of your best practices in the organization.

So, next time you catch yourself arguing “we’ve always done it this way”, stop and think. Recognize that it just might be the right time to question the so called wisdom.

Technorati Tags: organizational memory, organizational learning, best practices

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