Session 14

ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY

Using Schein's three levels of organizational culture,
we'll consider how basic underlying assumptions, espoused values, and artifacts all interact with each other

Memory constructs narratives from experiences, influencing decision-making and perception.

This discussion is about remembering happiness, but watch it thinking about remembering things that worked, rather than things that didn't.

Daniel Kahneman

But what about the memory of the field you are studying?

Organizational memory consists of the accumulated information regarding past decisions. This information is not centrally stored, but rather it is split across different retention facilities. Each time a decision is made and the consequences are evaluated, some information is added to the organizational memory.

1. You can think about it in terms of doing something, or in terms of understanding the environment.

Taylor built one of the greatest teams in the history of high-technology and kept it together for years. Heroic lone-wolf entrepreneurs may be the preferred heroes of narratives spun by the media, but history has shown us that teams—and the networks that come from them—are the true engines behind innovation in Silicon Valley and far beyond. No one understood this better than Bob Taylor.

2. You've never heard of tech legend Bob Taylor, but he invented 'almost everything' by Leslie Berlin in Wired, 21 April 2017

You don't have to read these unless you wish to, but we might touch upon them in conversation

Organizations come into existence for the pursuit of specific purposes. Purpose demands coordination, planning, and supervision. It requires the systematic introduction of rationality criteria, of cause and effect, cost and benefit. The pursuit of purpose encourages behavior and structure aimed at reducing uncertainty. All of this gives rise to that characteristic organizational form, bureaucracy. The specificity of functions in a bureaucracy mirrors the specificity of its purposes.

1. Posen, B. (1984). The sources of military doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the world wars. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
   pages 43-46

... inculcating a culture of historical-mindedness when dealing with present problems is a very important concept in leader development. Historical-mindedness helps to refine a logical thought structure for purposeful decisionmaking.

2. The Role of Military History in the Education of Future Officers by Michael Evans, 1997.

THINGS WE'LL TALK ABOUT

Reflecting back on your thinking about this in terms of the individual, what kinds of artifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptions reflect and express our place of employment? of school? of voluntary gathering?

I may have some examples to share as well.

SOMETHING TO TAKE AWAY

Vieni via con mi

Paolo Conte and his place in Last.fm. A quote from his Wikipedia entry ...

Paolo Conte (born January 6, 1937) is an Italian singer, pianist, composer and lawyer notable for his grainy, resonant voice, his colourful and dreamy compositions (evocative of Italian and Mediterranean sounds, as well as of jazz music, South American atmospheres and of French-language singers like Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens) and his wistful, sometimes melancholic lyrics.