Learning Histories LO4603

Jeff Conklin (conklin@cmsi.com)
Thu, 4 Jan 96 15:35:06 CST

Replying to LO4450 --

There's been a great exhange here about creating corporate histories,
the role of hypertext, how to change the culture of an organization
to value the learning captured in the corporate history, etc.

In LO4450 K.C. said

> So there are two points of focus
>
> a) improving the value of the information in the history
> b) reducing the work of accessing it

Others have commented that a third focus is the shift in the culture
(or practices) of the organization that would make it more "history
oriented", i.e. that would reward people for digging up historical
knowledge, and would also overcome the (natural?) tendency to create
something new from scratch without wanting to know if someone else
already solved the problem (known also as NIH: "Not Invented Here").

I believe there's a passage in "Alice in Wonderland" where Alice,
lost deep in a forest, asks the White Knight "Which way out of the
woods?" and the White Knight replies "That depends on where you want
to go!"

Creating organizational memory is a kind of forest. So a new
question is "Where do we want to go with organizational memory (or
learning histories, etc.)?"

>From the comments so far on this thread, I infer that one common goal
is to have captured information about projects (i.e. in a "library")
so that other people, later on, can find it and apply it to a new
project. I would call this the goal of "reuse." E.g., they had good
success when they used a binsnorter on the last project, and that
project was kind of like our current project, so we should consider
using a binsnorter too. I believe that this is the default goal, and
not the best one strategically.

Another, very different, goal is within-project "continuity." In an
age of large and shifting project teams, with new people coming in,
old people leaving, and (occasionally) the project being turned over
to a whole new team, there is a pressing need for the kind of short
term memory that would create more *continuity* from one month to the
next, from one team to the next. I hear complaints all the time
about "reinventing the wheel" and "listening to the same discussion
being rehashed over and over, meeting after meeting." These are
symptoms, I believe, of a failure of short term memory.
Organizational long term memory would be nice, but short term memory
is *really* important! And it is almost certainly a precursor to
effective long term memory.

So let me rephrase my original question:

What have you seen that works to create a sense of continuity WITHIN
projects, over weeks, months, years? I'm talking about large projects
where there are lots of stakeholders and the players inevitably come
and go to some extent. Groups working on "wicked problems" ... that
sort of thing.

I should be candid and admit that my company, Corporate Memory
Systems, has an approach that we claim is successful at creating
effective short (and long) term memory in projects of this scope.
But I'm really interested in what others have learned about the idea
of treating organizational history as a really valuable resource.

--
Jeff Conklin,  Chief Scientist,  Corporate Memory Systems, Inc.
11824 Jollyville Road, Suite 101,  Austin, Texas  78759
512 918/8000 Voice                512 918/9600 Fax 
Email: conklin@cmsi.com           WWW: http://www.cmsi.com/info