On institutional memory

Organizations with high turnover lose institutional memory faster than they realize. The knowledge doesn’t disappear all at once—it degrades gradually as people leave and take context with them.

What’s lost isn’t facts. Facts get documented. What’s lost is judgment: why certain decisions were made, what tradeoffs were considered, which approaches failed and why.

New people arrive, encounter the same problems, and make the same mistakes because the context for past decisions has evaporated. This is especially acute in government and development work, where project cycles are short and institutional knowledge rarely gets codified.

The solution isn’t better documentation. It’s building systems that preserve judgment, not just decisions. Oral histories. Post-mortems that capture reasoning, not just outcomes. Overlapping tenures so knowledge transfers through conversation, not handover notes.

Institutions that do this well treat knowledge transfer as a core competency, not an administrative task.