Corporate Memory Leaks

I was reviewing the books that I wanted to read over the next couple of weeks / months and came across Building Expertise – Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement by Ruth Colvin Clark. The other book that I think I will read is Knowledge Management, Organisational Memory and Transfer Behavour; Global Approaches and Advancements (Advances in Knowledge Management Research) by Murray E Jennex.

Corporate memory is something that fascinates me. It never ceases to amaze me how organisations can appear to ‘unlearn’ something that has happened in the past. I was conducting a knowledge management training session and invited a senior executive to address the group before we got started. I expected him to say how important managing knowledge was to the future of the organisation and how the career progression of those in attendance would be affected by their ability to understand and deliver on those expectations. Instead of giving the usual address he invited everyone to take their paper and write down the answers to the questions he was going to ask. I won’t bother repeating the questions as they were very specific to the company in question but essentially he said, “Did X happen in 1995, 2000, 2005 or never?” He posed about five different questions with different dates but I started to note a pattern in the questions.

I noticed that the dates were roughly five years apart.

What he had learned was that it took roughly five years for that organisation to unlearn something!

As we explored it further it became apparent that the cultural norm within this organisation was that you would move jobs roughly every 18 to 24 months. In some instances the movement would be triggered by promotion, in some it would be moving to another area to gain new or additional skills or perhaps it was to fill a resource need on a project. The reasons changed but the cycle was roughly 18 to 24 months.

What he had noticed was that if four people held a post in succession for the normal 2 years, let’s call them A, B, C and D, then if an incident occurred half way through the term of A being in post, then by the time it came for C to leave the post and D take over, typically the incident would have repeated itself with resulting injury, loss of life or loss of production. They had also found that while the incident might not have been exactly the same as before it was so similar as to make no difference.

One of the reasons for this repeating of incidents was that the focus was on determining what had happened, learning lessons. A lesson learned document would be produced and it was assumed that everyone involved would read and apply any recommendations made at the time. Now while A was still in post everyone tended to remember the incident and applied the advice of the lessons learned. However by the time that B took over the role memories were starting to dim and the specifics of what happened where getting lost. By the time C took over the role very few if anyone could remember the incident, it was no longer in the daily conciseness of people, and if asked about it some people could probably remember vaguely something happening.

To avoid this pattern of behaviour continuing in the future a process was put in place that did two things. The first was to go back and look for incidents that had happened in the past and identify what was currently being done to avoid it being repeated at some time in the future. The other thing that was done was to ensure that an action was put on every lesson that was learned and that action remained in place until it could be proven that it had been fully auctioned. So in future whenever they conducted a After Action Review or a Retrospect, any actions which arose would be assigned to a specific individual and target date for implementation of the action set. Outstanding actions were reported to senior management who ‘encouraged those who had not closed out their actions to do so’.

The human brain is great for storing sentiments and big picture memories but rather poor at storing the minute detail that can made the difference between success and failure.


Knoco Ltd