Memory

A business is a construct that’s made up of people. But just like the cells in our body can be entirely replaced without us ever losing sight of who we are, what we know and what we think we are here on this planet to do – the people in a business can be entirely replaced without the business changing its name, brand, values or processes.

The metaphor doesn’t stop there. Memories are made of experiences and perception filtered through knowledge. In our brain they are separated in declarative memories we hold and non-declaratives ones. Declarative memories are of the True-or-False type and they create the certainty we have in the world. Non-declarative ones are skillsets. Climbing tricky mountains without a rope, riding a bike or driving a car, are perfect examples. Both types are complex constructs and they rely not so much on individual cells or even neurons (otherwise they’d be lost over time) but on patterns.

A business is no different. It too has a memory. It knows where it is, what it does and how to do it. It remembers right from wrong (declarative memory) so it would never, for instance, take a customer’s money and then refuse to deliver a product or a service, and it also knows how to deal with the myriad situations that call for nuanced business behavior like having a social conscience and providing great customer service .

The human brain however doesn’t retrieve memories. It restructures them . This makes it both more effective and more efficient. This is where the metaphor I’ve used so far both breaks down and, at the same time, becomes even more reflective of what is going on. The patterns of a memory that tell a business what to do in a given situation are encoded in its culture, values and beliefs. And if those connections are not reinforced then they become weakened and break off. In effect, that part of what a business knows becomes forgotten.

The best case of this is, perhaps, the J&J Tylenol Crisis of 1982 . Johnson & Johnson’s handling of it created a textbook case on how to handle a public relations crisis, changed the rules for the safe handling and shipping of pharmaceutical products worldwide and made the company’s brand name a byword for putting people above profits, humanity above pragmatism and thriving as a result. For the sake of this piece, consider my assessment of the Tylenol crisis that, from a J&J perspective, was not really theirs to own (supermarkets really had a safety issue here) and the ‘collateral damage’ – i.e. the number of people directly affected by it was insignificantly small given the number of people who used their product on a daily basis. Had they argued that this crisis was not theirs to solve and as far as they were concerned it was business as usual, they would have been logically but not morally, correct.

Thirty-six years later the same company would find itself in the position of having to pay compensation for selling talc products contaminated with asbestos and taking actions, internally, that were designed to decrease its culpability by hiding the facts.

When memory goes wrong in people it often presents us with paradoxes. Depending on the type of amnesia sometimes people are incapable of forming short-term memories (anterograde amnesia) but can recall the past in great detail and terrible clarity or, they can deal with the present with amazing focus and precision, learn new, complex things and respond to what is required of them but be unable to remember who they are, what they have learnt or who they know (called amnestic syndrome).

People whose memory function is disrupted this way have, usually, experienced some kind of brain trauma. Companies do not have that excuse. While the memory of specific actions and values and beliefs is stored in individuals and they will, inevitably, be replaced it is in the effort that is placed on reinforcing, retrieving and – occasionally – critically examining the past that a company can find itself suffering from a form of amnesia.

Because businesses lack interoception it is easy to see any effort to re-examine, retain and re-learn from what is already known as a waste of valuable resources that eats into the bottom line. Yet, without such an approach a business not only fails to learn from its experiences but it often loses its way completely.?