>Earlier this year there was a thread on the need for corporate memory to
>support organisational learning. If I remember correctly, the bottom line
>was that we agreed that corporate memory was a good thing to have.
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>
>I think at this point I need to ask some questions:
>
>1. is the fact that individuals require an intellectual stake in the
>analysis process actually a real problem (or am I just making life hard
>for myself?)?
>
>2. if so, has any research been conducted in this area as to how people
>can "buy-in" to the analysis process over time?
>
>3. corporate memory (as I understand it) has been developed on the basis
>of document storage. Has anyone investigated how individuals can access
>and reuse this corporate knowledge (especially in non-routine
>problem-solving situations)?
>
>I welcome your comments on these ideas :->
>
>John O'Neill
>DSTO C3 Research Centre, Australia
>email: jao@itd.dsto.gov.au
>
John, the work that George Roth and I are doing on "Learning Histories" is
leading into some of these terrains.
(Learning Histories are a technique we're developing at MIT's Center for
Org. Learning to create documents, based on oral
histories-plus-qualitative-analysis, that reproduce the experience of a
change effort or learning team in "jointly-told-tale" form, so that the
rest of the organization can use their experience to move forward.)
Personally, I think individuals require not just an INTELLECTUAL stake but
an EMOTIONAL (story-oriented?) stake. They need a sense of personal
contact with the people who learned. They need the learning experience
translated into a kind of myth.
(It's going to be translated into myth anyway, but usually the myth's
message is: "Someone screwed up." We're trying to develop better myths,
along the lines of: "There were significant forces at work to help and
hinder the change effort, and some of them weren't visible until later.")
We always set up the Learning History so the bulk of it is told in
participants' own words. That's done to give people a stake in the process
-- and hence credibility.
For point #3, we believe that these documents should not just be handed
around, but carefully disseminated in workshops designed to help people in
other parts of the organization move forward in change efforts of their
own.
And point #2, what research has been done? We haven't stumbled across any
that I can think of - at least not following up an effort to build
institutional memory in any form. Maybe others know of some...
-- Art Kleiner, art@well.com