Some companies forget the knowledge they should remember and pay a huge price to retrieve the lost knowledge. Some companies remember the knowledge they should not remember and fall into the trap of the past.
Organizational forgetting refers to the behavior that an organization can no longer recognize and recall the knowledge that exists in the organization under certain conditions, or that errors occur during the process of re-recognition and recall. For enterprises, a lot of knowledge will be gradually forgotten over time. Therefore, managing organizational forgetting well to prevent the loss of useful knowledge will help maintain corporate knowledge. In addition, implementing organizational change requires the organization to forget a lot of knowledge.
Management Methods of Accidental Forgetting
Accidental forgetting includes memory wear and failure to capture Accidental forgetting is the behavior of an organization forgetting valuable knowledge involuntarily, which will weaken the organization's competitive advantage. Accidental forgetting by organizations must therefore be overcome.
Memory wear. A company will forget the built-in knowledge that exists within the organization due to memory wear. This knowledge includes the company's philosophy, values, etc. The forgetting of built-in knowledge reduces an organization's competitiveness. The company was founded in 2000 (the original name of the company was changed to 2012). The company's founder Thomas John Watson won the trust of a large number of customers by adhering to the concept of customer first when he started his business. By the time Thomas Watson Jr. left office, he had defeated all competitors in the computer industry to become the world's largest computer manufacturer. From the 1990s to the early 1990s, the company became increasingly conservative and autistic. The three core values that supported the company during the Watson and Son era, respecting the individual, putting customers first, and striving for excellence, were gradually forgotten. The company's rampant management bureaucracy not only alienated employees but also neglected customers, many of whom defected to its competitors. Annual performance fell for the first time in years. In 2008, the company lost US$100 million. People almost thought the company was hopeless. The company's memory wear and tear took a huge toll.
Some useful knowledge will wear out if it is not used frequently. This wear and tear of knowledge manifests itself in the form of key employees changing jobs, the disruption of established good working relationships, the loss of important documents, and so on. This kind of forgetfulness will only reduce the competitiveness of enterprises. Since this knowledge often exists in inconspicuous places in the company, such as an idea with R&D value in the mind of a junior employee, companies should try to overcome this type of forgetfulness.
Xerox Company developed a maintenance process manual in order to improve the work efficiency of large equipment maintenance personnel. However, although the maintenance manual points out the way to solve the problem for the maintenance personnel, the key question for the maintenance personnel is what should they do when the manual does not work. Xerox researchers found that when manuals didn't work, maintenance workers simply ignored them and went to have breakfast. It turns out that the maintenance staff will interact with each other during breakfast and even gain new perspectives on some difficult machines. It can be said that in the chats between Xerox maintenance staff, the maintenance staff formed a collective practical knowledge base. This knowledge base is better than any individual's knowledge and even better than the company's information. However, this knowledge can only be shared within maintenance groups in various locations. Xerox has a global maintenance staff. If they cannot manage this knowledge in a timely manner, the knowledge may be forgotten due to changes in employees. So Xerox launched Project Eureka to manage this knowledge.
Xerox's practice tells us that to overcome memory attrition, we must first know where and how this knowledge exists. Secondly, we should incorporate this type of forgetting management into the company's strategy and have a team or organization with full-time responsibility and sufficient authority to manage this. Knowledge.
Unable to capture. Mainly refers to the inability of enterprises to integrate new knowledge into the larger organizational memory. In this case, companies often neglect to provide new knowledge to other departments of the organization, so that when some employees of the organization leave, new knowledge is also lost, affecting the company's competitiveness. Therefore, companies must integrate the new knowledge acquired by these employees into organizational memory and institutionalize it.
The integration of new knowledge into an organization requires two processes: strict encoding and translation of the new knowledge, and diffusion within the organization. However, these two processes will be affected by many interfering factors. In addition, valuable knowledge within the organization is always scattered among different entities. Employees who master new knowledge are always unwilling to spread knowledge, so it is difficult for new knowledge to be integrated into the organization. In this regard, companies should establish a good employee incentive mechanism to make employees feel that sharing their knowledge can bring rewards to themselves and the company, thereby creating an atmosphere of knowledge sharing. Like Xerox, many companies have realized the importance of capturing new knowledge and have established organizational knowledge databases. But surprisingly, even if individuals enter the insights they think are useful into the database, they have little effect. It is often the case that what one person finds useful may be weird, idiosyncratic, superfluous, or mundane to others. Arguably the more a database stores a person's favorite ideas the less useful it becomes. Xerox overcame this problem when designing the Eureka database. Maintenance workers first provided suggestions to local experts in this field, and then entered the database after coding and translation by relevant experts and engineers. This reduced the difficulty for other maintenance personnel to capture new knowledge. At the same time, Xerox encourages employees to create more new knowledge by paying remuneration to employees who create new knowledge and naming this new knowledge after the inventor.
In addition, the connection between new knowledge and existing knowledge is also an important factor affecting the capture of new knowledge. Organizations can capture new knowledge more effectively when employees tie it into their current areas of expertise. Otherwise, employees will not only not realize the importance of new knowledge to the organization, but they will also think that new knowledge threatens their status and reject new knowledge.
Management methods of intentional forgetting
Intentional forgetting includes abandoning and avoiding bad habits. Compared with accidental forgetting, intentional forgetting is the conscious forgetting of certain knowledge by the organization. Intentional forgetting helps the organization gain a competitive advantage.
Sublate. Sublation is when an enterprise intentionally transfers some knowledge that is rooted within the enterprise. Abandon knowledge that is not helpful or even harmful to the development of the company. This is the opposite process to learning. The main methods of sublation include breaking conventions and restructuring business models.
In the late 1990s, Japanese manufacturing companies realized that the concentrated production strategy brought cost advantages while limiting the diversity of the company's products. To achieve product diversity under the agglomeration production model, higher costs must be paid for a wider variety of production lines. Toyota first abandoned the concentrated production strategy and created a flexible production system. Flexible production systems have given Toyota a huge competitive advantage. In the late 1990s, Toyota's car manufacturing time was compressed into days. But Toyota Motor Sales' business model has not changed much during this period. It still takes days to complete sales and distribution, which offsets Toyota's advantages in manufacturing cars. In 2006, Toyota decided to change this business model and merged Toyota Motor Manufacturing Company and Toyota Motor Sales Company. At the same time, all directors of Toyota Motor Sales Company retired within a month. With the retirement of the board of directors, the built-in knowledge of Toyota Motor Sales' original business model was abandoned. The new directors changed the previous order processing methods and developed a computer system for timely response. Through the restructuring of the sales model, Toyota successfully integrated sales and Delivery time is cut in half.
Avoid bad habits. Learning is a double-edged sword. In the process of corporate learning, you can learn knowledge that increases competitive advantage and you can also learn some knowledge that weakens the company's competitiveness. Organizations must be able to distinguish between useful knowledge and bad habits and remove these learned habits before they enter organizational memory.
Compared with learning itself, the real challenge faced by enterprises is how to learn the right knowledge. One of the biggest challenges for an organization is learning from failure. Companies may not be able to pinpoint the causes of failures and those shortcomings that cloud the organization's judgment. Worse yet, organizations may view their failure as merely a failure of a specific activity. Ford attributed the failure of the 2000s simply to Ford's inability to build small cars. In the following years, it did not ponder the real reasons for the failure of the business model of the low-cost strategy it pursued. This kind of thinking has been deeply rooted in Ford's organization. It is precisely because this kind of thinking restricted Ford's reflection on the underlying reasons for its failure that it was unable to restore its century glory in the following years. When a company succeeds, the experience of success is often difficult to perceive correctly. Company leaders may mistakenly attribute success factors to factors that are not success factors.
Many companies forget the knowledge they should remember and pay a huge price to retrieve the lost knowledge, while some companies remember the knowledge they should not remember and fall into the trap of the past, relying on uncompetitive companies. Technology or insisting on assumptions that are inconsistent with the market. Truly successful companies are able to adapt to changing circumstances by acquiring new skills not only through learning but also through unlearning. Companies must develop the organization's forgetting capabilities while shaping their learning capabilities. Otherwise, the organization may learn some knowledge, such as bad habits, that weakens its competitiveness. It is important for organizations to manage organizational learning while managing organizational forgetting. Only in this way can organizations gain sustained competitive advantage by managing organizational knowledge.
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