How soon they forget: Organizational memory and effective policies // Jon Shamah

more acceptable for the individual to contribute to the organizational knowledge rather than not.

Making that data available to search is easier. It is just technology, and attendant problems can be overcome with lots of storage and a really good search engine — there are plenty available and most can be made simple to use.

Building a willingness to mine this organizational information is not so easy, either. It is not that the individual is not aware of the value of searching. Since the turn of the century, the likes of Google and Yahoo have been household names and the first point of call for problem solving. The issue lies again in the psychology of the individual. Constructing a solution to a problem from scratch is believed to be more virtuous than citing and utilizing someone else’s solution. Maybe there is an element of not wanting to appear less creative and original? It is essential that re-use of existing organizational knowledge is encouraged and rewarded.

Organizations must be good at building on their past experience, and utilizing the information thus accumulated to solve problems. They say that armies always prepare to fight the last war (this would be a case of over-learning from the past), but this may be less of a problem in military campaigns: one of the first principles taught to military officers is that no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy, and as a result the military tends to be adaptable to changing circumstances it encounters on the battlefield.

Politicians, however — and the public — are not so flexible, and their over-learning of the past may have catastrophic consequences. Political leaders rely on analogies to past events, crises, and wars to make sense of current crises — and to mobilize public opinion to support the policies they choose to address these crises. The result is that both leaders and followers often find themselves locked into a (mis)-perception of the current situation. Wars are often the outcome (see, for example, Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War [Princeton, 1992]; and Robert Jervis, Perceptions and Misperceptions in International Politics [Princeton, 1976]).

Until the issue of proper learning from past experience is finally resolved, organizations will still need to bring in consultants to help fix problems. These consultants have longer memories than the organization, they have “been there, done it.”

The question then needs to be asked is: “Why are there so many security consultants?” As a consultant myself, I do hope that it takes a few years before that answer is found and our experience is no longer needed.

Jon Shamah is Principal Consultant at EJ Consultants Ltd.