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11 Organizational Learning and Organizational Memory

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
— George Santayana (1863 – 1952)

This chapter addresses the processes involved in organizational learning, or how an
organization can continually improve over time by learning from its successes (best
practices and innovations) and its failures (lessons learned). In order to be able to
learn, the organization must be able to document milestone events and “ remember ”
them through access to an organizational memory. The major processes involved in
organizational learning are outlined and a review of organizational memory models
is undertaken.

Learning Objectives

1. List the major benefi ts of documenting experiential organizational learning in the
form of an organizational memory.
2. Outline the major barriers to good organizational memory management.
3. Defi ne corporate amnesia and reasons why this may occur.
4. Outline the key steps in the evolution of an innovative new idea and the institu-
tionalization of a best practice that forms the object of reuse.
5. Compare and contrast the components of leading organizational memory
models.

Introduction

Organizational knowledge is being lost at an alarming rate as businesses continue to
downsize, to outsource, and to draw from a pool of increasingly mobile knowledge