documentation: August 2009 Archives
People may resist the notion of documenting their institutional memory, since the process of documentation can take time and effort that don't really seem worthwhile. Considerable evidence exists to show that even things that we think we'll remember well ought to be written down anyway.
Consider the unreliability of eyewitness accounts of crime. The movie "Rashomon" tells the same story from four different angles, each different from the others. The movie may be fictitious, but its essential meaning is actually quite true: Eyewitness accounts of events are extremely unreliable. Even when factors like stress are taken out of the situation, it is thought that we start to forget much of what we've heard or seen within just 20 minutes of the event. This is why police seek to obtain witness accounts of a crime as quickly as possible after an event and why lawyers recommend that drivers involved in auto accidents write down what happened while they're still on the scene. This makes intuitive sense; it might take a moment or two to recall what you had for breakfast this morning, but it would probably take serious thought to remember what you had for lunch a week ago Tuesday. We forget lots of details along the way.
A good program for preserving institutional memory recognizes that an institution has a combination of memories it needs to preserve:
But process memories are also deeply affected by eyewitness accounts. Three different people could easily see the same oil change or seal change in a piece of equipment and come away with three entirely different accounts of how to get the same job done. This is why technical writing is such a strange field; everyone knows how frustrating it is to try to use a badly-written operations manual, but nobody seems to be very enthusiastic about writing a better one. Yet doing so is more important than we usually realize -- until something goes wrong and we try to re-establish what we did in the first place. Just try to re-create the steps involved in wiring a home entertainment center, much less tearing down and rebuilding a complex piece of equipment, like a motor or a pump, from scratch.
But even when event and process memories are valued and documented well, it's likely that decision memories are almost entirely neglected. It's easy to understand how it happens -- we don't like to get buyer's remorse, so we convince ourselves that any decision we've reached was the best and we forget about the alternatives. But it's important to document the process of reaching the decision anyway, since those paths not taken may end up being surprisingly useful down the road.
If a capital project has an expected service life of 20 to 30 years, it's entirely possible that people working in an institution in their 20s will be middle or upper-level managers in the same institution by the time the project has to be replaced or upgraded. Unless someone documents the process by which the original decision was made, including notes on the alternatives not taken, the 50-year-old manager who's been with the institution all along will usually be guided more by 25 years of habits and built-in bias than by a fresh look at the available alternatives. And the situation is likely to be even worse if the 50-year-old manager making the decisions came into the institution recently and doesn't even have a memory for when the original project was completed in the first place.
We can always hope that people within an institution will pick up on these memories and this understanding of how things work just by remembering on their own. But just like it's impossible for a student to learn by sleeping on a stack of textbooks and hoping the words work their way into the brain by osmosis, it's impossible to rely on the effectiveness of the human memory without putting pen to paper. As the pen company quotes Confucius as saying, "The weakest ink is mightier than the strongest memory."
Consider the unreliability of eyewitness accounts of crime. The movie "Rashomon" tells the same story from four different angles, each different from the others. The movie may be fictitious, but its essential meaning is actually quite true: Eyewitness accounts of events are extremely unreliable. Even when factors like stress are taken out of the situation, it is thought that we start to forget much of what we've heard or seen within just 20 minutes of the event. This is why police seek to obtain witness accounts of a crime as quickly as possible after an event and why lawyers recommend that drivers involved in auto accidents write down what happened while they're still on the scene. This makes intuitive sense; it might take a moment or two to recall what you had for breakfast this morning, but it would probably take serious thought to remember what you had for lunch a week ago Tuesday. We forget lots of details along the way.
A good program for preserving institutional memory recognizes that an institution has a combination of memories it needs to preserve:
- event memories, which are things like the construction of new facilities or the arrival of new employees
- process memories, which note how things are done in order to save time and ensure their reliable repetition in the future
- decision memories, which explain how the institution chose one path or policy or course of action over another
But process memories are also deeply affected by eyewitness accounts. Three different people could easily see the same oil change or seal change in a piece of equipment and come away with three entirely different accounts of how to get the same job done. This is why technical writing is such a strange field; everyone knows how frustrating it is to try to use a badly-written operations manual, but nobody seems to be very enthusiastic about writing a better one. Yet doing so is more important than we usually realize -- until something goes wrong and we try to re-establish what we did in the first place. Just try to re-create the steps involved in wiring a home entertainment center, much less tearing down and rebuilding a complex piece of equipment, like a motor or a pump, from scratch.
But even when event and process memories are valued and documented well, it's likely that decision memories are almost entirely neglected. It's easy to understand how it happens -- we don't like to get buyer's remorse, so we convince ourselves that any decision we've reached was the best and we forget about the alternatives. But it's important to document the process of reaching the decision anyway, since those paths not taken may end up being surprisingly useful down the road.
If a capital project has an expected service life of 20 to 30 years, it's entirely possible that people working in an institution in their 20s will be middle or upper-level managers in the same institution by the time the project has to be replaced or upgraded. Unless someone documents the process by which the original decision was made, including notes on the alternatives not taken, the 50-year-old manager who's been with the institution all along will usually be guided more by 25 years of habits and built-in bias than by a fresh look at the available alternatives. And the situation is likely to be even worse if the 50-year-old manager making the decisions came into the institution recently and doesn't even have a memory for when the original project was completed in the first place.
We can always hope that people within an institution will pick up on these memories and this understanding of how things work just by remembering on their own. But just like it's impossible for a student to learn by sleeping on a stack of textbooks and hoping the words work their way into the brain by osmosis, it's impossible to rely on the effectiveness of the human memory without putting pen to paper. As the pen company quotes Confucius as saying, "The weakest ink is mightier than the strongest memory."
A common American experience is the publication of the annual high-school yearbook, complete with photos of students and documentation of the football team's victories and defeats. But yearbooks also serve a role which may go unrecognized: They preserve the "rules" surrounding a school's traditions.
Because most students spend no more than four years in high school, they barely reach the stage where they've learned a set of traditions before they graduate and move on. Four years may seem like an eternity to the student, but in a world where "The Simpsons" has been on the air for 20 seasons, it's comparably just the blink of an eye.
By depositing their memories in a yearbook, though, students contribute to the record and evolution of their school's institutional memory. The human drive to do this may be stronger than we realize: Consider the Wikipedia entry for the BBC's nightly shipping forecast or the website of the Eastern Airlines Retirees Association and its related pilots' association. These websites contain lots of ephemera and cultural memories about institutions that people have, for whatever reason, cared about. But Wikipedia shouldn't be the only place where these memories are recorded.
An institution that stays around for the long term -- like a high school -- has to note what it has done on a regular basis, and an annual cycle makes as much sense as any other. This is not to say that a company or a municipality or a school must publish a yearbook. But the basic principle of appointing an historian and charging that historian with documenting some of the important changes and some of the ephemera of that institution on a regular (presumably annual) basis makes it at least somewhat likely that the culture of the organization will be preserved, even as individuals come and go.
If the culture is healthy and worthwhile, then a yearbook (or something similar) can serve to remind the people involved about what works. If the institution is slipping, then an annual review should help to reveal that as well. An institution has to be aware of and sensitive to its signs of vitality just like a person has to be similarly aware of his or her own physical well-being. Ignoring a serious and recurring pain doesn't make the diagnosis of the problem any better -- it just means that the patient has ignored a symptom and likely made it more difficult for the doctor to help.
An institution could certainly combine its cultural "yearbook" with its annual report, although the two serve unique functions. The annual report documents measurable changes, while the yearbook is mainly a cultural record. But both are valuable -- perhaps it's better said necessary -- to a strong institutional memory.
The Internet offers lots of tools for helping to record these cultural records, though it should not be relied upon unless the institution is also committed to building and maintaining (indefinitely) its own website. Wiki-type websites can be easy to establish, and they are helpful when people are geographically dispersed -- hence, we can use a site like Wikipedia to find out how "You Can Call Me Al" has been used by college marching bands from Washington to Florida -- but when people are closer together, it's most likely better to designate an individual historian (or a small committee of historians) with a designated role.
Because most students spend no more than four years in high school, they barely reach the stage where they've learned a set of traditions before they graduate and move on. Four years may seem like an eternity to the student, but in a world where "The Simpsons" has been on the air for 20 seasons, it's comparably just the blink of an eye.
By depositing their memories in a yearbook, though, students contribute to the record and evolution of their school's institutional memory. The human drive to do this may be stronger than we realize: Consider the Wikipedia entry for the BBC's nightly shipping forecast or the website of the Eastern Airlines Retirees Association and its related pilots' association. These websites contain lots of ephemera and cultural memories about institutions that people have, for whatever reason, cared about. But Wikipedia shouldn't be the only place where these memories are recorded.
An institution that stays around for the long term -- like a high school -- has to note what it has done on a regular basis, and an annual cycle makes as much sense as any other. This is not to say that a company or a municipality or a school must publish a yearbook. But the basic principle of appointing an historian and charging that historian with documenting some of the important changes and some of the ephemera of that institution on a regular (presumably annual) basis makes it at least somewhat likely that the culture of the organization will be preserved, even as individuals come and go.
If the culture is healthy and worthwhile, then a yearbook (or something similar) can serve to remind the people involved about what works. If the institution is slipping, then an annual review should help to reveal that as well. An institution has to be aware of and sensitive to its signs of vitality just like a person has to be similarly aware of his or her own physical well-being. Ignoring a serious and recurring pain doesn't make the diagnosis of the problem any better -- it just means that the patient has ignored a symptom and likely made it more difficult for the doctor to help.
An institution could certainly combine its cultural "yearbook" with its annual report, although the two serve unique functions. The annual report documents measurable changes, while the yearbook is mainly a cultural record. But both are valuable -- perhaps it's better said necessary -- to a strong institutional memory.
The Internet offers lots of tools for helping to record these cultural records, though it should not be relied upon unless the institution is also committed to building and maintaining (indefinitely) its own website. Wiki-type websites can be easy to establish, and they are helpful when people are geographically dispersed -- hence, we can use a site like Wikipedia to find out how "You Can Call Me Al" has been used by college marching bands from Washington to Florida -- but when people are closer together, it's most likely better to designate an individual historian (or a small committee of historians) with a designated role.
Every institution has some sort of historical archive, whether by accident or by design. Either there's lots of detritus left around in corners of closets and tucked in distant filing cabinets, or a deliberate effort has been made to record, store, and preserve historical information for posterity. The trouble is that artifacts of every kind, from papers to material samples, are subject to the ravages of time. Thus, for archives to be of any use, someone must have the responsibility to ensure that those archives are safely kept.
A 2008 fire at the Universal Studios video vault was thought to have destroyed 40,000 to 50,000 old movies and television episodes. The company claimed it had backup copies of all of the materials -- and rival studios like Sony claim to have original copies of all of their archives, along with two sets of duplicates, all stored in different parts of the country. That sort of preservation security may sound like overkill, but to a movie studio, those original and duplicate recordings are likely the most valuable things they own.
Institutions looking to protect themselves from the effects of similar calamities ought to assess their own archival policies to ensure that in case of disaster, they have some foundation upon which to rebuild. Proper archives would include both historical and contemporary materials for safe keeping. Those materials ought to include at least the following:
Disasters can happen; the city of Parkersburg, Iowa, lost everything in its city hall when an F5 tornado destroyed the building in 2008. All of the city's records went with the building. Protecting the most vital information in a way that can be easily recovered is essential. A simple method may be to ship digital records on DVDs or other memory media to an out-of-town post office box, preferably in some location 100 to 200 miles away from the main site. That helps to ensure that they are geographically isolated from any large-scale disaster close to home, but close enough that they can be retrieved within a day's drive if necessary.
A 2008 fire at the Universal Studios video vault was thought to have destroyed 40,000 to 50,000 old movies and television episodes. The company claimed it had backup copies of all of the materials -- and rival studios like Sony claim to have original copies of all of their archives, along with two sets of duplicates, all stored in different parts of the country. That sort of preservation security may sound like overkill, but to a movie studio, those original and duplicate recordings are likely the most valuable things they own.
Institutions looking to protect themselves from the effects of similar calamities ought to assess their own archival policies to ensure that in case of disaster, they have some foundation upon which to rebuild. Proper archives would include both historical and contemporary materials for safe keeping. Those materials ought to include at least the following:
- employee records
- warranty information
- purchase records for major equipment
- duplicates of major contracts
- records of historical significance
Disasters can happen; the city of Parkersburg, Iowa, lost everything in its city hall when an F5 tornado destroyed the building in 2008. All of the city's records went with the building. Protecting the most vital information in a way that can be easily recovered is essential. A simple method may be to ship digital records on DVDs or other memory media to an out-of-town post office box, preferably in some location 100 to 200 miles away from the main site. That helps to ensure that they are geographically isolated from any large-scale disaster close to home, but close enough that they can be retrieved within a day's drive if necessary.
Many people are familiar with annual reports issued by large companies like General Electric. They tend to be a combination of bland fiscal reporting (mandated by the SEC) and cheerleading by management at the company issuing the report. But annual reports have a significant role to play in helping to preserve institutional memory.
One might think that an annual report is too much work for a small organization. But there's no reason why an institution as small as a single person couldn't find value in producing an annual report. Nobody seems to teach a course in "How to write an annual report," but a simple set of questions provides the outline an organization needs to write its own annual report:
A charitable organization might not have "customers" in the business sense, but it has members, donors, and charitable recipients. Knowing the ebbs and flows in those interactions -- and why they occurred -- can tell future leaders what worked in the organization and what did not. Expertise isn't driven by innate genius but rather by deliberate practice and analysis of past successes and failures. The world's most-renowned investor writes legendary annual reports reporting as often on his failures as on his successes. But had these lessons gone unwritten, their long-term value would be anything but obvious.
An organization's annual report doesn't have to be long or complex -- even a single page will do. But unless year-to-year changes are documented and kept somewhere everyone can find them and refer to them, an organization easily risks losing the basic understanding of its own historical performance that it needs to remain viable.
One might think that an annual report is too much work for a small organization. But there's no reason why an institution as small as a single person couldn't find value in producing an annual report. Nobody seems to teach a course in "How to write an annual report," but a simple set of questions provides the outline an organization needs to write its own annual report:
- Who worked here over the course of the year? Who was hired? Who left?
- Who received special training or education?
- What equipment or service contracts did you add? Why?
- What equipment or service contracts did you remove or cancel? Why?
- What equipment or systems were repaired, changed, or overhauled?
- How much work did you do?
- What circumstances affected the volume of work that you did?
- What customers did you serve? Which were new? Which were repeat? Which customers were lost?
A charitable organization might not have "customers" in the business sense, but it has members, donors, and charitable recipients. Knowing the ebbs and flows in those interactions -- and why they occurred -- can tell future leaders what worked in the organization and what did not. Expertise isn't driven by innate genius but rather by deliberate practice and analysis of past successes and failures. The world's most-renowned investor writes legendary annual reports reporting as often on his failures as on his successes. But had these lessons gone unwritten, their long-term value would be anything but obvious.
An organization's annual report doesn't have to be long or complex -- even a single page will do. But unless year-to-year changes are documented and kept somewhere everyone can find them and refer to them, an organization easily risks losing the basic understanding of its own historical performance that it needs to remain viable.
