Institutional Amnesia: What Happens When You Can’t Remember the Past

Today we have a guest blog from Dan Weedin:

As baby boomers start the process of exiting the business stage, they take with them a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge and smarts. Are you prepared to preserve your past so you don’t destroy your future?

I recently worked with a client who told me that over the next five years, 86% of their workforce would be eligible to retire. This is a startling number and caused this organization to pause. We worked on creating a leadership development program that systematically transfers experience-based knowledge through a professionally based mentoring model. Regardless of the size, scope, or industry of your business, you will benefit from instituting a thoughtful, intentional mentoring model in your business.

Otherwise, you may end up suffering from institutional amnesia. Consider these points…

• Employees leave due to retiring, finding a new job, or dismissal. They have knowledge that’s valuable – operations, technology, human resources, sales, and administrative. What’s that worth?
• You may have set up protections for sharing vital information and proprietary property. What you may not have thought of are shortcuts, efficiencies, contacts, and operational processes attained over the course of years that improves productivity and saves valuable time.
•  Without gleaning organizational “secrets of success,” you’re bound to actually “break” what might be a smooth running machine. How long does that take to fix?
• Preserving institutional memory is a business strategy that most businesses haven’t considered, but will be a huge topic in the future. Who is better capable of teaching than those valued employees who made your success possible? You will find that they are more valuable as a teacher than potentially just playing out the string.

You have the opportunity to retain your memory with a few easy and painless steps…

• Institute a formal mentoring program. Train your veterans on how to show the young guns the ropes. Create joint accountabilities and engage all sides by showing them why it’s important to the organization and to them individually.
• Create redundancies for critical organizational information like passwords, client relationships, and crisis management. Businesses spend countless hours and money to design high tech redundancies for data. They spend less time establishing human redundancies that are caused by illness, injury, termination, retirement, or any other loss of services. Why would you leave your most valuable asset – the smarts inside your employees’’ heads – to chance?
• Avoid gravitational pull. On the road to any desired future state there lies many speed bumps and traps. I call it gravitational pull. It’s easy to go back to that place when time and patience are short; money is tight; or supervisors stop holding employees accountable. This final step is the most critical point.

Bottom line – if you have employees who hold institutional knowledge, then you are in danger of getting amnesia. The results of institutional amnesia include institutional death. The scary thing is it may be happening and you don’t know it until it’s too late.

What have you done to avoid being hit with “amnesia?” What are you prepared to do to retain your institutional “smarts?”

© 2012 Dan Weedin. All Rights Reserved

DAN WEEDIN

Dan Weedin helps turn his clients business risk into rewards. He is able to take the abstract concepts of risk and crisis management to help business owners prepare and respond more effectively and with less time and cost to crisis. Since he doesn’t work for an insurance company or agency, he is able to act as an unbiased advocate for his clients. You can lear ore about Dan and how he can help your business on his web site at www.DanWeedin.com.