On Organizational Memory: 'Re-vision' the Past to Envision the Future

A post by Soniya Dabak

Memories nourish us and haunt us…guide us and delude us. Infused in the words, sounds, tastes… the texture of our experience, memories can represent the comforting cocoon of familiarity we crave or the sharp stabs of pain we wish to avoid. And just like, as individuals, we cling to the threads of our memories, organizations have memories of their own… the threads of shared experience and knowledge woven into the fabric of the organization.

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about memory of late and reflecting on how we could focus on the role of organizational memory in shaping learning and change in organizations.

As much as organizational memory can bind us together with a sense of belonging (the echoes of old anecdotes, milestones etc.), it can also blinker our vision by constraining us from imagining alternatives. ?Anyone who likes reading alternate historical fiction can probably relate to how it expands our minds by challenging our sense of inevitability about the past and developing an appreciation for new, contradictory perspectives to it. Could we apply the same process to organizational memory? Could we construct an alternate history of the organization to create a more liberating vision for the future?

The “4-I” Framework of Organizational Learning by Crossan, Lane & White (1999) can be adapted to understanding how our experiences get encoded into organizational memory and how individuals, teams or organizations could rewrite their memories to free themselves up for change. Let’s try to use this framework with an example of a change that everyone is going through. The change in the way we work, specifically our ideas around hybrid work.

Intuiting: Intuiting is about developing an individual understanding or a cognitive map to make sense of experience. For example, you experience that you form personal bonds strongly when people connect informally in person, around water coolers or lunches. You develop a hypothesis that connecting in person is vital to team bonding.

Interpreting: Interpreting involves developing a collective understanding. This is when you strengthen, revise, or refine your hypotheses through conversations with others and hearing about their experiences. Conversations with others and learning about their experiences helps you define boundary conditions. For example, you may develop a refined hypothesis that connecting in person is vital to team bonding especially during specific phases e.g., new team assimilation or when the work of the team is highly unstructured.

Integrating: Integrating refers to developing shared practices, routines and language that supports the collective understanding. Taking the example above forward, the shared hypothesis that connecting in person is vital to team bonding especially during specific phases will prompt a team to develop practices and routines that align with this hypothesis e.g., meeting in person during new employee assimilation or in person brainstorming sessions.

Institutionalizing: Finally, institutionalizing lies in embedding the practices and understanding into systems, structures, and processes e.g., the organization comes up with a hybrid working guideline which incorporates the shared routines and practices.

As we see here, this entire process begins with the individual cognitive map; the set of working hypotheses that I, as an individual, form, based on my experiences. Visioning exercises are about conceptualizing a desired future state. Visioning exercises are considered a critical component of driving change in organizations. Our ability to imagine a future state, however, is defined and constrained by our current cognitive maps. For instance, if I have never experienced what it is like to form personal bonds without connecting in person, it is very difficult for me to conceptualize a state in which this is possible. To be effective at visioning, we need to reframe our cognitive maps and learn to intuit and interpret differently. Examining our beliefs and assumptions with new information coming in helps in ‘double – loop learning’.

But this is easier said than done. We are all highly susceptible to the narrative fallacy, which is our tendency to weave explanations into facts, to bind them into stories with cause – effect relationships. As an example, if I have experienced that strong team bonds coexist with in person informal connect, I am likely to attribute the in person connect as the cause of team bonding. Doing so is straightforward, aligns with my cognitive map and does not cause unwarranted discomfort to me. But it also constrains me from a deeper exploration of what it is about in person connect that really leads to team bonding. What specific aspects of in person connect result in stronger team bonds and are there ways to retain those aspects without connecting in person? It is difficult to imagine an abstract future when the felt experience of the past and the present is so real, visceral, and tangible for us, which is precisely the reason why any radical change is so hard. But instead of envisioning a new future, how about re-visioning the past? Write an alternative history for the organization. There is some research to suggest that thinking about alternative versions of the past (this is called counterfactual thinking of ‘what-if’ thinking) leads to more effective decision-making for the future, as it prompts people to consciously search for more information that disconfirms their preexisting beliefs.

Let’s apply this approach to the example of remote working from before. Re-visioning the past, in this case, would mean imagining an alternate history of work, imagining that we have always worked completely remotely, and then asking ourselves: If there had never been an option to work in person in the past, how would we have formed team bonds? What would our individual and collective experiences of working have felt like? What practices and routines would we have developed? What processes and policies would have been put in place to enable these? This kind of counterfactual or what – if reasoning would help a team generate a range of alternatives. For instance, it could lead the team to the realization that the very definition of the team environment could have looked and felt different if we had never worked together in person. Maybe there never would have existed such a practice as a ‘team meeting’, maybe most work could have been asynchronous. Maybe… there would be a mind bogglingly vast range of alternatives.

This is just a glimpse of how rewriting our histories could prompt envisioning our future. No question is inherently right or wrong, but its power lies in generating a profusion of alternate realities in our minds, to desist from viewing events through a single hypothesis. Re-visioning the past could free up our minds to make the intuitive leaps necessary to envision the future.