The Remembering Organization

Every decision we make is an act of memory. Are you facilitating the formation of your organization’s unique and invaluable memory?

A Remembering Organization actively cultivates memories that shape future decisions rather than assuming documentation, data sets, and AI alone will do the work. Memory is formed through the recollection and retelling of experiences. Consider this one:

“One rainy day 40 years ago, Jim Moylan was headed to a meeting across Ford’s campus and hopped in a company car. When he saw the fuel tank was nearly empty, he stopped at a gas pump. What happened next is something that’s happened to all of us: He realized that he’d parked on the wrong side.

Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t infuriated. He was inspired. By the time he pulled his car around, he was already thinking about how to solve this everyday inconvenience that drives people absolutely crazy. And because the gas pump wasn’t covered by an overhead awning, he was also soaking wet. But when he got back to the office, Moylan didn’t even bother taking off his drenched coat when he started typing the first draft of a memo.

‘I would like to propose a small addition,’ he wrote, ‘in all passenger car and truck lines.’

The proposal he had in mind was a symbol on the dashboard that would tell drivers which side of the car the gas tank was on.

‘Based on personal experience,’ he wrote, ‘I feel that this little indicator would remove the guesswork of which side I want to park.’ He continued: ‘For the minor investment involved on the company’s part, I think it would be a worthwhile convenience.’*

A minor fix. A lasting impact. Thanks to Ford Motor’s Jim Moylan, since 1986 every car has generously had a tiny arrow on the dashboard, indicating which side the gas tank is on.

That story is organizational memory, transferred. It has endured because it’s easy to remember, easy to repeat, and useful. It carries not just the what, but the why and the how — a moment of irritation turned into insight, then into action.

That story is organizational memory, transferred. It has endured because it’s easy to remember, easy to repeat, and useful. It carries not just the what, but the why and the how — a moment of irritation turned into insight, then into action.

Most organizations don’t operate this way. Instead, they’re quietly bleeding knowledge and calling it something else: turnover costs; onboarding friction; failed integrations. They’re mistakenly performing “documentary theater” — producing reports and dashboards that fail to influence performance and growth, if they’re read at all. Spending significant time on antiquated learning initiatives, but not on person-to-person knowledge appreciation and transfer.

This results in a false sense of security: the belief that knowledge has been captured, when it has not been transferred, let alone expanded upon. (As Jerry Seinfeld wisely noted at the rental car counter, “Anyone can take a reservation, it’s the holding of the reservation that matters.”)

It’s not just information that’s being lost, but context, judgment, and the reasoning behind decisions. People are being denied the opportunities to learn new information and to recall and create memories. And people act on memory.

It’s not just information that’s being lost, but context, judgment, and the reasoning behind decisions. People are being denied the opportunities to learn new information and to recall and create memories.

Daphna Shohamy, PhD, Director and CEO of Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, explains that memory is “a behavioral whisperer, a source of information that helps us deal with the present. It helps us understand what we’re seeing and doing and helps us make plans for the future as well.”

So, memories not only preserve the past — they allow us to rehearse the future. Memories shape our decisions.

Organizational amnesia is costly. Mistakes resurface. Decisions get re-litigated. Momentum stalls, often invisibly, until it shows up in missed targets, cultural drift, or integration failure.

Documentation alone is no longer the answer to combatting organizational amnesia. Documentation relies on a fragile chain of assumption—that people will find, access, read, understand, and remember in critical moments. They won’t.

People don’t internalize knowledge by reading alone. Alex Sarellas, managing partner and CEO of PAJ GPS, explains: “When an engineer leaves our team, for example, we aren’t just losing someone who understands code or was filling up a role. We’re also losing all of the reasoning this person put into past decisions, the shortcuts they knew, and the kind of practical knowledge that no amount of writing can teach you. I’ve seen the same problems come up again and again just because this one person who knew the entire backstory and cause has left the team.”

Today, the people holding critical knowledge are moving faster, staying shorter, and being asked to do more in less time. Your organization is in constant motion: return-to-office mandates, AI-driven workforce displacement, increasing rates of mergers and acquisitions, and unprecedented workforce volatility. It’s imperative that you consider more effective ways to quickly surface and apply knowledge – ultimately creating and harnessing organizational memory.

You can elevate your organization’s invaluable knowledge to institutional memory — and invite listeners to imagine themselves acting and innovating upon the knowledge — through story, elicited in reflection and dialogue.

You can elevate your organization’s invaluable knowledge to institutional memory — and invite listeners to imagine themselves acting and innovating upon the knowledge — through story, elicited in reflection and dialogue.

When people are given space and time to reflect on the ways in which they access, network, and build upon information at hand — to consider how they work — they learn from others and they crystallize and appreciate their own wisdom.

Oral reflection is generally more effective and efficient than written. Asking people about their experiences is not only respectful, it also welcomes nuance, paradox, and abstraction. As Flannery O’Connor noted, stories are “a way to say something that can’t be said any other way.” The serendipitous actions that resulted in a surprising success, the full complexity of a crisis, the difficult lessons learned from failure — these insights often don’t surface, let alone get written down or repeated. But they’re contained in stories that underpin function and culture. 

The opening story about Jim Moylan inventing the gas tank indicator contains data, reason, and emotion. It’s memorable. That’s because emotion is the glue that binds memory in our brains. Your own workplace is undoubtedly filled with emotions such as joy, pride, awe, disappointment, and fear.

Stories also fit into the brain’s natural tendency to recognize patterns and organize information within a framework, making them more memorable than lists and significantly more likely to be repeated than facts alone. Retelling a story embeds it into our memories. With each retelling, we’re literally deepening troughs in our neural wiring that facilitate the recall.

Retelling a story embeds it into our memories. With each retelling, we’re literally deepening troughs in our neural wiring that facilitate the recall.

David Gurteen, who has spent decades studying how people learn and innovate through conversation, sums it up: “Stories facilitate reasoning; how we make sense of information and gain insight and make better decisions.” The translation from experience and amassed knowledge to shared, repeatable memory — and how those memories form meaningful narratives that influence behavior, decisions, and organizational culture — is the work we do at Thaler Pekar & Partners.

Several years ago, my firm worked with a large pharmaceutical company struggling to roll out a new Integrity and Compliance protocol. We guided them in making one shift: rather than pushing out messages and requirements, senior leaders shared stories exemplifying the meaning and values behind the new protocol. Employees could now imagine themselves as part of the new solution; they internalized the organizational ethical identity. Accelerating the understanding and adoption of a refined culture of integrity ultimately saved thousands of hours and mitigated millions of dollars in legal risk. The difference wasn’t more information — it was finding, sharing, and inviting the right memories.

Remembering Organizations ask for, listen to, and share stories. They uncover knowledge through stories so it can be understood, amplified, and committed to memory.

What’s the Jim Moylan story of your organization — and do people know it and amplify it?

*Credit: Wall Street Journal