practices: June 2009 Archives
According to an article in the July 6th edition of the Air Force Times (available only behind a subscription firewall), the US Air Force has been fighting a long decline in the popularity of its on-base membership clubs for officers and enlisted airmen. The story notes a variety of factors leading to the decline, including fallout from the 1991 Tailhook scandal and an armed forces effort to de-emphasize alcohol consumption. But it also quotes a retired lieutenant colonel who says, "You don't see as many members of leadership inside the clubs anymore. That hurts. Before, you'd see the general heading to the club so you'd tell your wife: 'We're going to the club. We'll have a good time.' It was important."
Base clubs encouraged servicemembers to talk with one another, encouraging the cross-pollination of ideas among people who might branch out more in a social environment than they would normally do in the formal on-the-clock environment. It's no different for a civilian institution: It's easy for people to pigeonhole themselves into doing one kind of job, and talking only to the people who do related tasks. But too much individual myopia can lead the entire organization to forget what it does well and to fail to develop new innovations that would make it work better. Like Les Nessman and his imaginary walls of masking tape, people often voluntarily restrict their interactions at work with people who don't seem necessary to their tasks.
As the retired colonel notes, though, leaders understand that talking across those masking-tape lines makes the organization better and more resilient. They have to set the tone, though, whether it's going to the base club or hosting a company holiday party or just inviting employees out to lunch. Every institution needs conversation across those imaginary lines in order to preserve what it does well and to find new ways of doing things better.
Base clubs encouraged servicemembers to talk with one another, encouraging the cross-pollination of ideas among people who might branch out more in a social environment than they would normally do in the formal on-the-clock environment. It's no different for a civilian institution: It's easy for people to pigeonhole themselves into doing one kind of job, and talking only to the people who do related tasks. But too much individual myopia can lead the entire organization to forget what it does well and to fail to develop new innovations that would make it work better. Like Les Nessman and his imaginary walls of masking tape, people often voluntarily restrict their interactions at work with people who don't seem necessary to their tasks.
As the retired colonel notes, though, leaders understand that talking across those masking-tape lines makes the organization better and more resilient. They have to set the tone, though, whether it's going to the base club or hosting a company holiday party or just inviting employees out to lunch. Every institution needs conversation across those imaginary lines in order to preserve what it does well and to find new ways of doing things better.
When people hear an unfamiliar phrase like "institutional memory", they may find it confusing. We can define institutional memory as how an organization preserves and enhances the knowledge of its people, but that's not necessarily much more helpful. A better way is to illustrate with the quintessential American game of baseball.
Most Americans grow up to have at least a passable knowledge of the game of baseball, many times without even knowing how they learned it in the first place. You may not play in a rec league or manage a fantasy team, but if you take your average American to a ballpark, they'll have a basic understanding of the purpose of hitting, fielding, pitching, and the like. That's because baseball is around us -- even if only in the background -- from spring training in late February all the way through the World Series at the end of October. Minor-league baseball teams are everywhere, and tickets are cheap enough that it seems almost impossible to escape an American childhood without having spent at least a couple of days at the ballpark.
But if you ask someone from a non-baseball-playing country, the game will probably seem like a mystery. The world plays and watches soccer and is even giving baseball the boot from the Olympic Games. So how do Americans learn a complicated game so well that we use its jargon as shorthand for everything from dating ("We made it to second base") to politics (where candidates are "on deck" for meetings and rallies)?
It happens because Americans have an institutional memory for baseball. But it's so ingrained in our habits that we generally don't even notice it. But by taking a step back from a game we know well, we can learn how to apply the lessons of baseball's institutional memory to the other things we do:
Most Americans grow up to have at least a passable knowledge of the game of baseball, many times without even knowing how they learned it in the first place. You may not play in a rec league or manage a fantasy team, but if you take your average American to a ballpark, they'll have a basic understanding of the purpose of hitting, fielding, pitching, and the like. That's because baseball is around us -- even if only in the background -- from spring training in late February all the way through the World Series at the end of October. Minor-league baseball teams are everywhere, and tickets are cheap enough that it seems almost impossible to escape an American childhood without having spent at least a couple of days at the ballpark.
But if you ask someone from a non-baseball-playing country, the game will probably seem like a mystery. The world plays and watches soccer and is even giving baseball the boot from the Olympic Games. So how do Americans learn a complicated game so well that we use its jargon as shorthand for everything from dating ("We made it to second base") to politics (where candidates are "on deck" for meetings and rallies)?
It happens because Americans have an institutional memory for baseball. But it's so ingrained in our habits that we generally don't even notice it. But by taking a step back from a game we know well, we can learn how to apply the lessons of baseball's institutional memory to the other things we do:
- Knowing the rules. Baseball has a long list of formal rules, many of which are well-known (three outs retire the side) and some of which are a little more complicated (like the infield fly rule). But all of the rules are written down. They have been debated and revised many times over, but the entire code of baseball has been written down. Similarly, any institution that wants to preserve its institutional memory has to write its rules on paper. There's no way to avoid it. If baseball's rules were left solely to the memories of the people playing it, the game wouldn't stand a chance. Neither does any other institution hoping to survive for the long term without committing every rule, policy, and procedure to paper somewhere. Nobody's saying that you have to lug out a copy of the rule book for every pick-up game of baseball in the park any more than you have to carry an operations manual around for day-to-day work. But if it isn't written down, it simply cannot be expected to be retained.
- Testing and measuring with a purpose. Baseball is a beautiful game in part because it has a colossal history of statistics. Teams play 162 games a year in the major leagues, plus spring training and post-season play. Every pitch and every play have been recorded. This mammoth warehouse of data has attracted economists and statisticians to baseball like no other sport. There's even a society dedicated to baseball research. The result is that statistics and measurements aren't feared; they're loved, even by non-sabermetricians. There are, of course, hundreds of decisions made in every game that come from gut instinct or trained reaction. But every manager knows his batting averages, ERAs, and pitches thrown, and uses those to his advantage. One of the great achievements in baseball is the no-no (no runs, no hits) -- a statistical measurement of what didn't happen, as much as of what did. Institutions outside of baseball should be similarly enthused about measuring, recording, and analyzing their statistics. How long has equipment worked without failure? How much time has been spent on maintenance? How much fuel has been used? These sorts of measurements should be recorded and reviewed. There's always going to be room for instinct and intuition, but those are for individuals. The institution needs a form of memory for what works and what doesn't. By measuring and analyzing data, the institution may be able to "learn" to correlate run-time measurements with that moment when Bob the maintenance guy thinks it's time for bearing replacement on motor #3. Some day, Bob won't be there anymore. But the records should be.
- Marking the field. When players are in the middle of a game of baseball, they don't have to guess whether a hit has gone fair or foul. The foul line is well-marked and extended vertically with the foul pole. Nor does anyone have to guess how far a home run ball has to travel to be out of the park. The outfield distance markers tell exactly how far. Much of what a player needs to know to make the game happen is stored outside his brain: It's recorded in the physical environment around him. We encounter this in our daily lives, too, particularly when we drive: Speed limit signs, painted crosswalks, and passing/no-passing zone centerline markers store and deliver necessary information at the moment we need that information, instead of forcing us to memorize every bit of knowledge that we might need. Building knowledge into the environment is often easier than storing it inside people's heads. And doing so makes the knowledge institutional, rather than something that stays (and leaves) with the people who have it. A good system for institutional memory seeks out ways to store knowledge inside the physical environment. A simple but extremely valuable example is the lock-out, tag-out system. A simple scissors clamp with room for multiple individual padlocks can form an extremely simple but reliable means of ensuring that the safety of individual workers is built into the environment itself. Instead of relying upon human memory or someone calling out to get an "all clear" before starting machinery, a lockout mechanism builds in a simple but reliable means of ensuring that nobody is accidentally overlooked. Building knowledge into the environment frees up people's mental capacity for bigger things.
- Keeping a box score. Wrigley Field has one of the nation's most recognizable icons: The big green manually-operated scoreboard. The line score for every major-league game appears for the entire audience to see, just as it has for more than 70 years. And on the flagpole atop the scoreboard, a simple "W" flag is run up after a win, originally to tell passing train passengers of a home victory (an "L" flag tells the obvious story to the opposite). Line scores (the boxed parts of box scores) are clear, simple, distilled depictions of the most important factors in a game: Runs scored per inning, total hits, and total errors. A quick glance at the linescore tells the reader everything essential in a single look. Institutions need their own forms of box scores, as well. Institutions need simple "box scores" and "line scores" for their essential performance data. In addition to telling how well things are performing, a routine built around checking the essential details of the institution's performance on a daily basis helps ensure that the most important things are never missed. A baseball line score with a blank space in the top of the seventh inning would immediately signal something wrong. Similarly, an institution needs to know what parts of its performance are so important that any hole in the data stands out immediately upon even a cursory glance.
