What happens, is that the knowledge and experience known as organizational memory (OM) - the unrecorded event-specific, organization-specific, and time-specific ‘how’ of know-how that characterizes any organization's ability to perform - walks out of the front door on a regular basis.
Jobs change was initially related to downsizing but it is now a general feature of the labor market, where, on average, annual employee churn exceeds 20% in many countries and up to 60% in some industries.
In its conception, organisational memory (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.
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.
The collective awareness of such knowledge and forms of practice 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.
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.
The latest capture tools to get attention [7] 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.
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’.