Corporate Amnesia - Capture Tools

Capture Tools

Knowledge loss is not entirely ignored in industry and commerce. In an attempt to capture and use its departing know-how, some organizations depend on intranets, electronic bulletin boards, theatrical improvisations, social networks and mentoring, but these channels all suffer from the effects of individuals’ memory loss, their defensiveness about failures, short jobs tenure and – above all – an inability to apply employee-specific precedent to better decision-making. To date the management of organizational memory is an unformalized discipline, not least because of the widespread lack of understanding of tacit knowledge, the prevalent belief that experiential learning is all about learning from others’ experience – what is called benchmarking - and the informal and theoretical ways managers are taught how to benefit from hindsight.

The latest capture tools to get attention are the traditional corporate history, usually seen as a public relations medium, and oral debriefing, an augmentation of the old-fashioned prescriptive and formulaic exit interview. The former is being produced as an induction/educational tool that transmits long-term memory while the latter, which concentrates on short- and medium-term memory, targets exiting and key occupant employees, recurring corporate events and important projects in detailed testimony of participants. Both are designed to extract tacit knowledge in an easily accessible format that also generates the ‘lessons of history’. Its permanent character also means that it does not have to be continually reproduced and that its necessary re-interpretation alongside changing circumstances is predicated on a more reliable evidential base.

In the world of evidential gathering where rigorous substantiation is a pre-requisite for experiential learning, the oral route is seen as more valuable than anything extracted from internally produced written sources. The reason its developers give is that individuals are generally better speakers than they are writers. Also, their spoken word is invariably a more efficient way of conveying the abstract and complex nature of ‘humanware’ elements like the nuances of corporate culture, management style and the often-obscure issues surrounding decision-making within groups. To further formalize what up to now has been a largely theoretical teaching process, the capture methodologies have also been applied directly to decision-making through an adaptation to the modern workplace of the experiential learning models developed by academic David Kolb and others’.