Those Who Forget the Past: Organizational Amnesia

  Lessons Learned   PM Network  

Question: Why is it that my company seems to make the exact same mistakes again and again, on one project after another?

Google “organizational learning,” and you’ll find 4.5 million references. Search for “organizational forgetfulness,” and you’ll find only a tenth as many. Not a scientific poll, surely, but it suggests that organizations do tend to repeat mistakes.

I just wrapped up a yearlong inquiry for an organization that lives and dies—often quite literally—based on its achievements in project management. It has been in business for about a century under various names, and had enjoyed so much success in fielding advanced technology projects that it was seen as the epitome of how to do things right.

That is, sadly, no longer the case, and we were commissioned to see what went wrong. How could an enterprise that managed projects so brilliantly for so long lose its way?

What we found surprised us. We did not discover a failure of organizational learning as much as a failure of organizational memory. We uncovered clear evidence that over its 100-year life, this institution had learned the lessons of project management numerous times. But the lessons were then forgotten, only to require relearning later, and at great cost.

In the corporate files, we found one letter from their CEO dated 1922, laying out …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.