Institutional memory is a collective of facts, concepts, experiences and know-how held by a group of people. As it transcends the individual, it requires the ongoing transmission of these memories between members of this group. Elements of institutional memory may be found in corporations, professional groups, government bodies, religious groups, academic collaborations and by extension in entire cultures.
Institutional memory may be encouraged to preserve a group's ideology or way of work. Conversely, institutional memory may be ingrained to the point that it becomes hard to challenge if something is found to contradict that which was previously thought to have been correct.
This got me to thinking about Social Memory, and interestingly enough, there was no mention of this in Wikipedia. I guess it doesn't make a lot of sense actually, but I am planning on visiting family members this evening that I rarely get to see and know that there are hundreds of hours of 'Social Memory' piled up waiting to be shared. Yet, I will only have a couple hours. How do we capture this valuable knowledge? (Note: I am taking my new MinoHD camera to capture as many stories as I can.)Which led me to think about the amount of knowledge that is walking out of the 100's of businesses that are laying off people by the thousands. What is happening to the Institutional Memory in those companies?
One of the ideas I have been talking about with our clients recently is how effective social media is in leaving artifacts of conversations, in the form of forum postings, discussion boards, presentations, white papers, twitter streams, blog posts and countless entries into Wikis.
If we consciously strive to make these types of conversations more discoverable, for all the obvious reasons and this new one, as the repository of Institutional Memory, then we have uncovered one of the biggest ROI's for spending time and money on implementing these tools in the workplace.
One line in the Wiki entry intrigued me:
As it transcends the individual, it requires the ongoing transmission of these memories between members of this group
Ongoing transmission. This implies that there is an overt and deliberate strategy in place. Most of the conversations I have suggest that most Companies are not thinking about how to manage these conversations. They are content to 'let it happen organically', yet in reality, this is rarely the case. I call them Conversation Starters (or Conversation/Community Managers), they are like the ideal cocktail party host - keeping things moving, making sure everyone knows everyone else, and that people don't sit on the couch and not talk to anyone.For us to have an Institutional Memory, we need conversations. We need to help people find the right people to talk to. We need to collect those conversations. We need to revisit them, as they capture the true culture of the Company.
Kevin Kelly at Learning 2008 said, "Conversation is the foundation of our culture". Does your company have a Culture of Conversation?
1 comment:
This is a great post, Mark.
I've pondered this from time to time, but didn't have a solid framework to work through the implications. The ongoing transmission part is key. I've seen various companies try to capture their intellectual capital by assigning team members to document their roles and the processes they use. The problem that inevitably comes is that these bibles are largely ignored, and worse often forgotten, being buried in boxes, rendering them useless.
Another key part to extending or continuing institutional memory is synthesis. Over time, new knowledge is gained, processes, standards and technologies evolve.
A good example of this is that Palm used to have a great 'indoctrination' process (my term, not theirs), to understanding the Palm design philosophy. They had one of their key executives give a presentation to all new Palm hires within their first two weeks of coming on board. The presentation contained scenarios that illuminated key insights for why Palm designed its products the way it did, and it was updated regularly. This was a very effective tool for helping them manage growth and maintain their institutional memory.
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