Corporate Amnesia - Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management

Both corporate amnesia and organizational memory are part of the new vocabulary associated with the broader discipline known as Knowledge Management (KM) under the even wider umbrella of the Information Age. In its conception OM consists of the institution’s documentation, objects and artifacts that are stored in the corporate library/electronic database) and which can be applied alongside resident employees who are intimate with institution-specific events and experiences. The physical evidence is known as explicit knowledge while the more cerebral is called tacit knowledge. They are integral for efficient decision-making and experiential learning to build on success and escape the pandemic of repeated mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons that litter modern industry.

Because of the high levels of jobs churn in the modern workplace, however, much of the mind-resident tacit knowledge is now non-existent within organizations, with employers believing that the imported tacit knowledge from employees hired from other institutions is an adequate stand-in that can be replaced by osmosis. Tacit knowledge, sometimes called cognitive knowledge or coping skills, is a category of knowledge first identified by the Hungarian-born émigré to the UK academic Michael Polyani in 1958, described as the non-technical 'how' of getting things done, what Edward de Bono, the inventor of lateral thinking, calls 'operacy’ or the skill of action, and what management guru Peter Drucker identifies in the use of the word techne (the Greek for 'skill'). Much of it is implicit and ambiguous and acquired largely by experience that is functional as well as context- and institution-specific.

Its collective awareness provides the type of expertise that is both an organisation’s adhesive and its lubricant - i.e. it relates to all the routines and processes (formal or otherwise) that make an organization tick. Its value represents the capability of the firm and is perhaps the main ingredient of its resilience. In broad brush terms, it includes the individual’s understanding and accommodation of their employer’s individual corporate culture, habits, management, communications and decision-making style, the contacts and relationships between employees or teams of employees, the detail of job-related events and the knowledge of tried and tested usage as it applies to the organization’s own market circumstances and special environment (so-called episodic memory). The qualitative application of OM is closely allied to memory, which is most commonly described as knowledge retention or the difference between having acquired knowledge and having to re-acquire it. It is what is not forgotten; the reconstruction of experienced events.