Organizational History – The Past Made Available For The Future

Every organization and industry must evaluate its own need for documenting its history, and this must be different from documenting processes — as history and experiences are documented to learn lessons.

- Gurucharan Singh Gandhi

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.