# Organisational Amnesia
URL:: https://www.polaine.com/2020/02/organisational-amnesia/
Author:: polaine.com
## Highlights
> The result is a kind of organisational amnesia. *Some* of the ways of working and process did remain, but it was living on in the remaining people more than the organisation. When they leave, the organisation will forget. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h4byd7494gewj20ka53tfrn4))
> If you think of people and practices as the neural pathways in the organisational brain, when they’re damaged—through redundancies, attrition or “restructuring trauma”, those pathways are destroyed, blocked or fade. Process is often used as a scaffold to rebuild the pathways. It does help to have an explicit process or methodology *that everyone understands and shares the meaning of*, but process alone does not preserve understanding and shared meaning. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h4bykepev6091tqdd2mggqhy))
> Practices, rituals and craft skills—what might loosely be termed cultures of doing—deteriorate if there is nobody practicing them or if they’re not valued. Think of languages that die out. Unless a practice becomes a habit and is valued in an organisation, it will fade away. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h4byktzx749tq5qxbay08ydz))
> When organisations ask us to train and coach their teams, it is essential that they lay the groundwork for those new habits and practices to take root. What happened to those clients I mentioned above is that they often assumed the new practice would just take flight because of the training alone. But the inertia of a large organisation’s existing processes, procedures and value systems can crush those newly forming habits extremely easily. Like seedlings, they need some protection before they can withstand the full organisational elements. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h4bym2kakydvspfrw6jfkmy4))
> The challenge for organisations is that they want the outcomes that self-reflective learners and practitioners can produce, but fail to set up an environment that helps their people learn to learn. Then the organisational amnesia sets in. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h4bymrxccgghnmxj33m88t1x))
---
Title: Organisational Amnesia
Author: polaine.com
Tags: readwise, articles
date: 2024-01-30
---
# Organisational Amnesia
URL:: https://www.polaine.com/2020/02/organisational-amnesia/
Author:: polaine.com
## AI-Generated Summary
I’ve noticed a pattern recently.
In the last 18 months or so, I have had three client organisations ask me to come and teach and coach their CX, UX or Service Design teams, help them improve their CX offering and the way the various CX-oriented departments work together.
So far, so normal. That’s what I do. The pattern is that all of these companies had already engaged me or companies I used to work for to do this a few years earlier, yet there was barely a trace of institutional memory of this work.
## Highlights
> The result is a kind of organisational amnesia. *Some* of the ways of working and process did remain, but it was living on in the remaining people more than the organisation. When they leave, the organisation will forget. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h4byd7494gewj20ka53tfrn4))
> If you think of people and practices as the neural pathways in the organisational brain, when they’re damaged—through redundancies, attrition or “restructuring trauma”, those pathways are destroyed, blocked or fade. Process is often used as a scaffold to rebuild the pathways. It does help to have an explicit process or methodology *that everyone understands and shares the meaning of*, but process alone does not preserve understanding and shared meaning. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h4bykepev6091tqdd2mggqhy))
> Practices, rituals and craft skills—what might loosely be termed cultures of doing—deteriorate if there is nobody practicing them or if they’re not valued. Think of languages that die out. Unless a practice becomes a habit and is valued in an organisation, it will fade away. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h4byktzx749tq5qxbay08ydz))
> When organisations ask us to train and coach their teams, it is essential that they lay the groundwork for those new habits and practices to take root. What happened to those clients I mentioned above is that they often assumed the new practice would just take flight because of the training alone. But the inertia of a large organisation’s existing processes, procedures and value systems can crush those newly forming habits extremely easily. Like seedlings, they need some protection before they can withstand the full organisational elements. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h4bym2kakydvspfrw6jfkmy4))
> The challenge for organisations is that they want the outcomes that self-reflective learners and practitioners can produce, but fail to set up an environment that helps their people learn to learn. Then the organisational amnesia sets in. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h4bymrxccgghnmxj33m88t1x))