Organizational Memory

Acquisition

Information about problems encountered, solutions identified, and decisions determined forms the core of any organization's memory. Several types of information are acquired within this process of development. First, a stimulus must be apparent. The identification of the stimulus might be considered a “felt difficulty,” a “problem,” or an “ecological change.” In any episode, the origin of the stimulus is an important aspect of the memory dilemma. Without adequate identification of the stimulus, future efforts to replicate the learning cycle are thwarted as similar issues may well be ignored. Second, the organization's response, including data collected, information gathered, and knowledge gained, concerning the stimuli must also be identified. Third, the outcomes of the responses must be examined and explored for future use and potential application across the organizational setting.

Retention

For memory to be useful to an organization, it must be retained. For the memory to be truly organizational, it must be stored in a variety of locations within the organizational structure. Such knowledge may be stored as “brains or paper”—that is, either within individuals and organizational cultural patterns, values, and beliefs or within the technologies of an organization's written policies, files, and records.

When knowledge is stored within the brains of an organization, it is housed as language based on shared, communal experience. As the belief structures of members shift to include shared norms and values, patterns of retention increase throughout the organization. Conversely, knowledge may be more officially retained as recorded data, policy, or documents. Administrative structures also serve as a mechanism for preserving knowledge as they formalize new practices into organizational commonplaces. As formalization of new knowledge occurs, retention is enhanced through the transformation of prior practice.

Retrieval

When members of an organization seek to use knowledge they have previously stored in its collective archives, several responses are possible. First, retrieval may be automatic; that is, members of the organization may be able to draw effortlessly on knowledge because it has been archived within new policy structures, commonly understood practices, or clearly defined procedural behaviors. Automatic retrieval results from a change in schema toward the problem presented; that is, it no longer appears unique to the collective organization and has become recognizable, given information from past situations. In situations where automatic retrieval functions at high levels, organizations are said to have “learned” or developed the capacity to respond in an “adaptive” manner to ecological change. Memory can be thought of as robust when automatic retrieval occurs.

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