Tapping the corporate memory

In one employer I worked at for over a decade I witnessed five generations of marketing department: five different heads. I just missed the sixth, which came in shortly after I left. There was some carry-over from the first to the second, and some between the fourth, fifth and sixth; but a pretty deep change either side of the third one. That’s roughly a change every two years. I’m not especially picking on that department, indeed, on KM’s journey from the Consulting function, via Operations and then HR, and finally IT, Marketing was one of its better homes. In a period of ten years you’re likely to see many different regimes in different functions come and go – and I did, not just in marketing. Similar story in a different employer before that where I was for eight years.

The corporate memory isn’t just one thing. To some extent, all of KM is about the corporate memory. Mostly we’re trying to make our best knowledge and skills part of our embedded ‘muscle memory’. What I mean by that is that some of the memory becomes the very fabric of the organisation – although – just as with all kinds of ‘compiled’ information, sometimes the actual history of how something came about and the reasons for it are lost and not documented. We find we have a particular policy, process or practice, but many more recent joiners don’t know exactly why. Often what then happens is a ‘metanalysis’ which is when a new analysis of the history and reasons is proposed. Typically this may come from a CEO or other new, incoming, senior head. They tell a story about where the company is and how it got there, which has the grey hairs glancing sideways with quizzical looks at each other: That’s not how we remember it. And that’s really what we mean when we speak of the corporate memory in a more limited sense: The collective memory of people who were there or who have heard it in an unbroken line of traditional anecdote sharing that can be traced back to those who were there. This kind of corporate memory is a powerful element of culture, linked to the mythology, sagas, heroes and symbols of the organisation. I don’t mean to say it’s all good – it’s subject to every kind of cognitive bias available, but it is powerful.

When you join an organisations you’ll start to acquire some of this mythology just as naturally as you start to assimilate the culture. I would say, also, make a deliberate attempt to tap into it as well. We don’t have to be hide-bound by the past, but, as a new, incoming Director, before you launch, say, an innovation program, probably be curious enough to check if there isn’t one already right now, or that there aren’t lessons from past attempts to learn from.

In the 1980s we learned that the grey hairs performed a vital, but previously unrecognised function in the organisation as connectors. They’re also the memory.