"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it" – is a quote attributed to George Santayana. Organizations would serve themselves if they paid heed to him.
An organization that has been around for a while will go through its own life-cycle and the learning thereof. If public memory is proverbially short, then organizational memory is arguably even shorter. The shuffling of teams, coming and going of incumbents, and change in leadership creates leakages of many kinds. First, the tacit knowledge around a role or a task gets permanently lost. Second, experiences get lost, particularly those which give a sense of what works and what does not, and what circumstances create effectiveness. Most organizations do not have a very robust method of mitigating this risk. A brief handover is ceremonially provided for at best, which may be done equally unceremoniously. Irrespective of the diligence of this process, this is at best a rudimentary effort to map the experience of a person or a role. There is more to it.
What about organizational memory? What about organizational decisions – involving strategy, customer segmentation, pricing and people? What about relooking at past decisions and evaluating if they did indeed turn out to be true? In the current scheme where leadership turnover itself restricts assignments to 3-4 years, what is long-term itself is quite questionable. However, there is rarely any attempt to document organizational experiences.
Organizational experiences that beg documentation can vary from industry to industry and hence attempts to document experiences may acquire different hues. However, some Meta questions will remain the same. Both type of questions must be distilled and documented.
Classical Meta questions could be the following — How were the decisions taken? Who took them? Who participated and who did not? Were the minority voices heard or not? What other choices existed that were not taken or ignored? How were the teams structured to execute the decision? How was execution structured and followed upon? Finally, a few quarters or years down the line results must be compared to the plan and assessed on assumptions made and actual results. Most goals are set making some assumptions and it is insightful to see how many of them turned out to be true and to what degree of accuracy. The variance between the assumptions made and reality indicates the organization’s ability to do long-term goal setting. Performance variation comes only second. Usually, it is the latter that is dissected, rarely the former.
Product companies can make documentation of prototypes — clearly distinguishing the prototype that went through for scale and those that were discarded, outlining the reasons for the choices made. Finally, the success or failure of those choices can be compared with the assumptions made. In case the product launch did not move and shake the market, then the prototypes that were discarded can be studied to outline what were the reasons why it was discarded so that better choices can be made next time. It is not the success or failure that must be studied alone – it is the underlying process of the success or failure that is more critical.
Brand companies can document customer insights, particularly if there were competing insights that led to brand decisions. The documentation can pour over why certain insights were given more prominence over the rest. What in the system mitigates the threat of group think? Is there a systemic capacity to screen the more powerful and market changing insight that might be hidden beneath the rubble over the more visible but less rewarding one? How to build such a systemic and cultural capacity?
This list might go on and on. Each organization and industry must evaluate its own need for documenting its history. This must be different from documenting processes. Processes are documented to create consistency and standardization. However, history and experiences are documented to learn lessons.
Only a handful of organizations invest in capturing their history in truly a deep way. Coke and GE are names that immediately come to the mind, although I am sure that there are other organizations too. Many have museums that tell their story. Such investments do a lot more to the pursuit of building pride in the new generation of employees than anything else. If open to general public, it will do a lot more in building brand and legacy that the ephemeral TV commercials.
A note of caution on this is that documentation of history in the way I am trying to describe is different from making organizational films, which are usually parochial and laudatory. They are made only to highlight achievements and portray a single dimension view of things. There is only pride at best and jingoism at worst in it – no lessons.
Finally, each organization has dramatic successes and failure – a handful of events that were so emphatic that they better be remembered at all times. These are events that might have propelled the organization to the proverbial next level of play or might have brought it to the brink of disaster. There might be stories of turnaround and the rise of a department or a region that rose from the ashes. All these stories beg documentation of history. They will serve as inspiring north stars or chilling reminders to the next generation of employees. This becomes particularly acute with high turnover departments and organizations, which having no idea of the past, tend to walk the same path with no signposts of past journeys made by the predecessors. In best of circumstances, it robs them of comfort of knowing that their brethren had walked these situations with aplomb and in worst of circumstances, it robs them of caution. Why should the organization pay the same price twice?
PS: Not all societies are comfortable in documenting their past – particularly in an objective way. It is an instinct that must be consciously honed with devotion and commitment of resources.