When Corporations Forget

October 31st, 2009
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Forgetting Is Only Acceptable for Charming Little Puppets

My grandmother used to say to me that I’ve forgotten more than she’d ever known. (She was just trying to be kind, boost my confidence. :) ) What’s curious from a KM perspective is that that statement – that one may forget more than another ever knows – isn’t just applicable to much-loved grandchildren… but, of course, to organizations.

Over 5 years ago, Andy Seidl (2004) wrote a great blog post about corporate amnesia – or organizational memory leak – which he argued was the result of “numerous, seemingly insignificant, day-to-day forgetting events”. The act of forgetting is a critical issue for KM in large organizations in particular, especially those with higher turnover rates.

What happens when knowledge walks out the door for the last time? What steps can an org take to avoid organizational memory leak?

I guess the bigger question is, Why would knowledge walk out the door for the last time in an enterprise-sized organization? In a small one with a few employees, sure – but in a large corporation with 250+ employees, there must be one or two who have similar jobs, use the same databases or shared drives, etc. No? So why then might an enterprise suffer from corporate amnesia?

Recent job cuts are a problem – especially when a corporation decides to cut a whole group, such as engineering/development, HR or Creative Services, in favour of outsourcing.

But what’s more interesting than that (because I’m sooooo tired of hearing about the tough economy) is the idea of social capital and tie-formation. More specifically, the idea that strong and weak ties can help people share knowledge across organizational boundaries. Check out this great article (1999) by Morten T. Hansen for more about search-transfer and weak ties The short story is that creating opportunities for people to network within an organization – for the third floor to mingle with the second – can actually help to prevent corporate memory loss.

Can technology help to avoid the loss of at least some organizational knowledge?

Seidl made a decent case for knowledge capture by means of internal blogging and fitting those intra-blogs into a federation of blogs (which he called a channel). He also offered an example of the success that this sort of knowledge capture achieved at a certain unnamed company, where the CEO insisted that everyone get involved in the “project blogsite”.

Today (yes, I know it’s just 5 years later), I think a lot of KM folks & employees alike would argue that being forced to contribute to a blog is… just… not… going… to… work. Further, with failed intra-blogging attempts abounding and the ongoing rhetoric of blogs as time-wasters doomed to failure, you’d be hard-pressed to find an enterprise-sized organization with a strong blogging community — a blogging community that’s able to effectively capture knowledge and a blogging culture that’s willing to visit said blogs to ascertain knowledge.

It seems there’s no affirmative response to the KM question: Can technology effectively capture both implicit & explicit knowledge? (Urgh! I so wish someone could build an app that would actually do this!)

But what, then, can we do about memory leak, about knowledge walking out the door? Pei-Wen Huang (n.d.) suggested a few solutions:

  • Create more apprenticeship programs
  • Debrief at the end of a project so people in & out of the project are brought into the loop about wins, failures, etc.
  • Establish a “corporate history”
  • Build “knowledge profiles” so you know whom to go to in an org for certain subjects

Apprenticeship programs are, of course, potentially expensive (but more expensive than losing a seasoned employee with high institutional knowledge?). The others seem simply time-consuming.

…There’s always an excuse, isn’t there? But I’m pretty sure shareholders wouldn’t want to hear that the corps they’ve invested in are “unable to commit the time” to holding 30-minute power-debriefs at the end of projects to avoid repeating mistakes & wasting money………

Well, if anyone has a better idea or wants to chime in on the above ideas – or simply wants to post a link to a blog on the topic – feel free. Looking forward to it…

~joanna

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  1. Jen C - November 2nd, 2009 at 6:22 pm

    I think that it is all the little things, like debriefs at end of projects (and several times throughout), management being active and involved in what is going on the organization, and having people work together (instead of in silos) will help organizations stop knowledge-leak.

    Of course, none of these solutions (nor the ones listed above) will work in isolation. The organization needs to be committed to KM for any solution, technology-based or not, to work.

  2. Carmen - November 3rd, 2009 at 1:18 pm

    Thanks for the insightful post. KM is established enough that it’s fairly easy to point to best practices with regard to corralling explicit knowledge. Often, I find as well, that explicit knowledge is also captured in embedded processes and functions within the organization, and when someone leaves the org these remain in place. I agree completely that using technology to capture tacit knowledge is not so easy. That’s where other techniques come into play — like communities of practice. I think these hold out the greatest potential for KM.

  3. Nancy - November 3rd, 2009 at 1:28 pm

    Here’s an interesting, brief overview of the value of KM, also in relation to people leaving: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newISS_87.htm.

  4. admin - November 13th, 2009 at 9:13 pm

    Carmen, we hear a lot about communities of practice in KM circles… but less in our workplaces. I’ve spent the last 3+ years at a very large software company that’s expanding globally pretty rapidly (which, of course, requires effective knowledge management in the worst kind of way as new ‘redundant’ groups open in Bangalore, Singapore, etc.)… but I have yet to hear the phrase “communities of practice” uttered – unless it was just once.

    So where are these communities of practice happening? At universities? In the government? What about in large public companies?–are such enterprises investing in techniques that better capture tacit knowledge?–do you happen to know of any that are, by chance? I’m curious. This subject really strikes a chord for me.

    Thanks again for your comment….

    ~joanna

  5. Arnold Kransdorff - November 14th, 2009 at 1:25 pm

    You invite ‘better ideas’ on corporate forgetting. Corporate amnesia is a subject i’ve been working on ever since I first identified the phenomenon in 1984, when the flexible labor market kicked in big time. See below for my three books on the subject, which identifies the enormous cost of the problem, specifically the inability to experientially learn, and the solution – the bettrer management of organizational memory (OM).

    + “Knowledge Management: Begging for a Bigger Role” (Business Expert Press 2009) http://www.businessexpertpress.com/node/70)
    + “Corporate DNA” (Gower, 2006) http://www.gowerpub.com/TitleDetails.asp?sQueryISBN=0566086816&sPassString=Y&sKeyword1=Kransdorff&sKeyword2=&sBooleanSearch=AND&sSearchFrom=Author&sSubjectCode=999&sNewTitle=999&lStartPos=1)
    + Corporate Amnesia (Butterworth Heinemann 1998) http://www.corporate-amnesia.com)

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