Institutional Memory: Why Organizations Repeat the Same Mistakes

Doctor K.: 00:00:00

Have you ever wondered why people at your company forget the contribution you made six months ago?

But never forget the small era from last week?

Or how the next project will be plagued with the same errors in decision making that caused so many problems in the last project?

Or why do people remember a big change as a great success when it was delayed over budget and didn't achieve a fraction of what it was set out to do?

Today we are exploring the concept of institutional memory.

How organizations retain and recall knowledge over time and dive into the psychological biases that shape these organizational memories.

Doctor D.: 00:00:40

Hello and welcome to the realm.

I'm Dr. D. And I bring the strategy.

Doctor K.: 00:00:44

I'm Dr. K, I bring the psychology.

We are business psychologists and your guides to the executive realm, where we bring strategy and psychology together so you can.

Doctor D.: 00:00:54

Bring your best to your C suite, your teams, and your customers.

So let's get to work.

Dr. K. What is institutional memory?

Doctor K.: 00:01:02

Institutional memory is a collective knowledge of experiences, things from the past, things that have just recently have happened, and historical lessons that have helped to create the values, the morals, the company itself, the atmosphere that the company has or the organization has put together.

Within this institutional memory.

It does include the good and the bad, the successes, the failures, the.

The decisions that were made, decisions that might not have been made, that we know that were there, and commitments that inform any future actions that might be happening.

Doctor D.: 00:01:42

This is one of my favorite topics because a lot of people don't think about organizations as having a memory.

And technically an organization doesn't have a memory.

But all these little artifacts and all these experiences of individual people shape memory.

If you think about each person and each document and each email as a.

In a network like within your own brain, you form memories by connecting different neurons together.

Essentially, that's a way oversimplification.

But institutional memory depends on who is in what role, when, what emails were sent.

And memories, just like in our real world experiences, are tainted and biased when you look back.

The reason I like this one so much is when I was younger in my career, I was working on a project that the organization desperately needed and it looked like it was going to cost about one or two million dollars, but we hadn't budgeted for it.

It's a lot of money, but we talked to the CEO and we said we should wait until next year, maybe do this later.

And the CEO was like, no, I'm going to fund this.

This is so important.

We're going to do it.

Here's $1.8 million.

Go get this done in the next four months or whatever it was.

Budget season came around and the next year, and they said, EO called us into the office, hey, you're over budget by $1.7 million.

We said, of course we are.

We actually underspent on the project that you funded.

You said, get it done this year.

He goes, oh, I don't remember doing that.

And so we got held accountable.

And some people missed their bonuses because we were over budget by a project that was funded by the CEO, but the CEO seemed to forget.

People remember what's documented down on paper and hold themselves accountable to strategies or budgets.

But when something feels really important in the moment and the decision is made, those decisions can conveniently get forgotten.

Doctor K.: 00:03:46

It's a memory loss that we all have.

Or when the memory loss helps us and it's not really a memory loss, it's like, nope, no, I don't remember saying that.

So if it's not documented or put.

Or someone documented, whether it's documented on paper or someone has recorded the session or the meeting or whatever it is, it is easily forgotten.

However, that doesn't mean that people that we're working on, as you were saying for your project, doesn't mean that people don't remember that.

And then that memory can lead to, hey, next time a big project comes up, let's not forget to document everything that was said.

The memories can be helpful in learning.

Doctor D.: 00:04:32

In hindsight, we should have gone back and done a revision to our budget or something like that to make sure that it was institutionalized, that it was actually recorded in long term memory and not just whisked away in short term memory when we needed it.

A lot of people don't really realize how frequently they interact with institutional memory.

I think this happens all the time.

This happens all the time to individuals where a person will make a small mistake.

We talked about this briefly in the intro or hinted to this at the intro.

Somebody makes a small mistake and it's remembered and it's a week before review time and the small mistake comes up on the review.

But the five or six really big contributions from six months ago or eight months ago are forgotten.

And this is something called recency bias that we tend to place more value on events that happened more recently.

Doctor K.: 00:05:28

The little bit of that contribution that they made a week ago is still so bright in the mind, still, oh my gosh, so important.

Even if what happened six, seven months ago led to this most recent contribution, a lot of times things take appropriate steps or need certain steps to get to a certain point.

The one Back there is like, oh, yeah, thanks for getting us that contract.

But this thing that you just did is the most important, amazing thing.

If you didn't have the contract, none of this would matter anyways.

But they tend to be forgotten, and that could be vice versa.

Sometimes the things, the most recent thing that you did that was wrong is more seen than all the good things that you've done in the past.

That's why when people are going in for their reviews, when I work with people that are like, I have my review coming up and I don't know, I immediately tell them, all right, you need to write down all your accolades, everything that you've accomplished, everything that you've either done on your own with the team, whatever it might be, because sometimes they are forgotten.

It's not always purposefully forgotten, but sometimes they are forgotten.

That's why there's a review.

What did you bring to the table?

Let me just tell you, here's my list.

Doctor D.: 00:06:41

And science also shows that people have a longer memory around negative things that happen than positive things.

So if you did something great and you immediately followed it up with something negative, people are going to very quickly forget about the great thing that you did and hone in on the memory on the negative thing, especially if it affects other people.

If it affects your boss, your boss is going to feel that sting of whatever the error was probably more greatly.

It's called loss aversion in psychology.

It is, you tend to overvalue or overestimate the impact of a negative experience or a negative event over a positive one.

And this works.

Also, thinking into the future, you worry more about a negative thing than you do about a positive thing.

So when you're thinking about giving feedback to somebody or if you're going to receive feedback, chances are the feedback is going to be more negatively weighted than it will be positively weighted.

Because that's human nature.

And that also colors the institutional memory.

Doctor K.: 00:07:48

I was thinking, as we've been doing this so far, is it's not always an institutional memory.

It's the history that we bring in.

And that history that we remember tends to distort instead of always help with what is currently going on.

Unless you have that person that just can always look at the bright side.

We tend to remember, oh, gosh, here comes a new manager in, and they always want to change everything.

And how do we know that this new manager wants to change everything?

We don't know that.

Maybe they're coming in just to keep doing with whatever's going on.

But if you've had a repeat of managers coming in to always change everything.

You just automatically put that negativity on that person.

Doctor D.: 00:08:32

And that is, I think, a behavior called reflection or transference.

It could even be where you're projecting your own thoughts and feelings and emotions on somebody else who might even just be a blank slate.

You have no idea who they are.

This is the basis of some stereotyping behaviors and in group and out group behaviors as well.

But in your example, Dr. K, where you mention constant turnover of managers and maybe those experiences with those managers aren't great, your expectation, your transference and reflection on that person is going to be, oh, here's another one.

You, you're not going to give them a chance that's going to probably color their experience with you.

And you're almost creating, and because of your own expectations, creating an environment where maybe that manager has a harder time succeeding.

And not just you personally, but all the people around you who have gone through that experience.

And somebody who's walking in new and might do a great job might be facing unexpected hurdles as a result of that psychology.

Doctor K.: 00:09:37

It's not giving them the opportunity to show what they want.

And that can cause, just as you called it, the hurdles that can cause hurdles for everyone, for the team, for the person coming in, for you, and for the organization.

Doctor D.: 00:09:50

In the end, an opposite thing happens, particularly with our own performance, which is what's called hindsight bias, that we tend to reflect on our own past experiences way more favorably.

Then we may have actually contributed, or we may polish our own history a little bit to talk about our successes or really step up our successes while minimizing our negatives that we've had.

So we'll talk a lot more about the things that we did well rather than what we've learned from our failures.

For example, and this shows up a lot in organizations when you're talking about projects.

So when a company wants to invest in a big project, they might say, we're going to achieve these 15 things and we're going to invest dollars to do it.

I'm making these up, obviously.

And then they might spend $15 million and only get five of the 15 things.

But when they launch that project, they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, we had some hurdles, but man, we really did it.

We achieved our goal.

And then when you're going in for the next project, people will tend to remember the positive.

Oh yeah, that project was so great, we need to do it just like that.

Even though it really cost more and delivered less, People will remember the success of that project and forget all the lessons and challenges and overestimation or whatever else happened in that.

And so the institutional memory gets tainted because you don't take those lessons learned from the last project and apply them to the next project.

The organization goes through the same cycle of over committing, under delivering, but then patting themselves on the back at the end saying, okay, yeah, we did a good job.

Even though if you went back and looked at the original business case, you may not have delivered on everything that you said you were going to do.

Doctor K.: 00:11:50

It is the hindsight bias.

I think that part is where from the psychology side is where people struggle with taking ownership of either taking ownership of having challenges, taking ownership of being the one that maybe produced the challenges, taking ownership of things that just went wrong.

It's not easy to say, here's where my mistake was and here's the parts that I played or just the part that I played in not hitting those 15 goals and only hitting five.

It's not easy to take that step back and objectively go, ooh, okay, yep, I still remember that.

That's where I could have done better.

It is not easy to take accountability, and that is, that's normal across the board.

But the question that you want to ask yourself is, okay, if I don't take accountability for my part, how am I going to be better the next round?

How am I going to help my team the next round?

How am I going to whatever it might need to be, how am I going to do that if I won't even allow myself to?

Even if you just silently take accountability just inwardly and go, okay, that's the part I played, how do we improve from there?

Because if not, you just think you did everything right and you might not need to.

Maybe you need to get some more education or you need to ask someone how to better do this, whatever it might be, if we don't take that accountability, that hindsight bias does come in and doesn't always, I would say probably more for the most part, doesn't allow room for improvement, change, what have you,.

Doctor D.: 00:13:31

And a lot of those lessons end up getting lost as a result.

It's an interesting thing about organizational culture that if somebody stands up in a project and raises their hand and said, I contributed really significantly to that project and I think I did an amazing job, that's often looked at as egocentric or boastful or undervaluing the contribution of other people in the team to the same challenge or the opposite of that.

When something goes wrong, expect somebody to Raise their hand and say, I did that.

I'm holding myself fully accountable for that.

When the reality is there were probably a lot of events and a lot of other decisions and circumstances that led to whatever that was that happened.

You should hold a person to the same level of celebration as you would to the same level of mistake of accountability.

But organizations are pretty unbalanced in that way.

Hey, we did that.

Great project.

I want to value everybody.

Everybody did this as a team.

Oh, that was a mistake.

That was the development team.

Johnny missed a piece of code, didn't comment it out.

It's really easy to point fingers at failure, but a collective win and what that ends up happening is if a small number, one or two or three people within a project really contribute disproportionately to the success of.

You want to remember that for the next project because they might not feel like they're going to be as committed to the project.

If you don't celebrate the successes just as evenly as you would hold someone accountable.

Doctor K.: 00:15:16

It's important, I think, for the team leader or management or C suite level to.

If you're going to recognize the success as a team, then it needs to be that the team is also held accountable for what things are wrong.

Now, if there is an individual that definitely had some really rough time or was just missing deadlines or whatever it might be, then that's when you take them to the side and say, okay, this is what we notice, so forth and so forth.

Because if it is pointed out, it can vary and it's always going to be a case by case scenario.

But if you point out for this one person in front of people, we don't know the reaction that they will have.

It could be like, oh my gosh, I've got to really do better.

They just called me out.

I'm so embarrassed.

Whatever it might be, it could also be like, oh, you're going to call me out, no one else out, because I can now point out becomes a very egocentric type of situation.

And so they have to be careful with that.

Doctor D.: 00:16:17

And this gets to the Pollyanna principle, where people tend to reflect particularly on their own performances being more favorable than their negative performance.

I can think of some experiences collectively between you and I, Dr. K, for with people that we've worked with that really overvalue the positive contributions that they make when there are a lot of negative contributions that have been made, but they still want a lot of accolade and affirmation around the positive, even though the negative things that happened were Way worse.

And as an outsider, judging somebody on the outside or on their performance, where the things that happen that way worse are, again, might be a bias on my side or on your side, where we look at it and go, man, these things have a really direct impact on us or our business or whatever we're working on.

They way outweigh the positive thing and we might undervalue the positive thing as a result.

It's very difficult to remain balanced when you are thinking about those things.

But back to the Pollyanna principle.

In a project, there is often one senior leader or stakeholder or somebody who is managing or overseeing the project.

They're a very visible focal point for a project or an initiative or a team.

And this is where it gets really challenging, because a leader over a team can be a focal point and they will get a lot of the accolades for the success of the team, but they might also become a lightning rod when the team is underperforming.

But it's really easy for that leader to overvalue their contribution.

So coordinating a bunch of resources and being a really good communicator and updating senior leadership on the progress and keeping a team organized is a necessary and important contribution.

But it might not be the most important contribution.

But that leader will tend to get more praise than any one person on the team.

And that can make team members feel undervalued or like, I don't understand what Dr. D did on this project.

All he did was talk to senior leadership on our behalf.

We did all the work.

Why is he getting all the praise?

It could be how some teams feel.

And it's really easy because of the positivity bias or the Pollyanna principle for hypothetically, me as a leader to say, look at all this great stuff that I did.

I did all this work.

This project was a success and it wouldn't have been a success without me.

So therefore, I'm going to take a lot of credit for this success and take a lot of pride.

But I'm also going to conveniently forget about all those stumbles that happened along the way across the team, because those weren't me, those were individual members of the team.

But the success as a whole, I should get some credit for that.

And I'm going to remember that and I'm going to talk about it in my next interview or my next performance review about how great that project went because of my success, which can lead.

Doctor K.: 00:19:20

To, especially for the team.

I know that we were just talking about the positivity bias, but in some way There we can go.

Look at the opposite.

If you're part of the team and all you hear is your team leader talking, taking all the credit, the next project that comes along could have a negative spin on it.

Oh, we're going to do all this work and that person's going to take the credit.

And why do I even work?

Why am I putting all this effort in?

When do we get seen?

And depending on if it's the leader or if it's the organizational culture or the atmosphere, that can spread.

If it continues, that can spread to a point where productivity is down.

Doctor D.: 00:20:04

This is a pooling effect.

This is a challenge where, particularly as teams get really large, it's really hard to.

Praise gets diluted.

Right.

If you have one leader over a team and they have three focal points within that team and those three focal points are managing 50 individuals, that one person might get a lot of praise.

Pass that praise to three people, and then those three people pass the praise to the 50.

But the 50 doesn't feel as impactful because it's not as personal.

The praise is diluted.

And usually accountability doesn't follow the same path.

It follows usually a very directed path down to senior leader, to the one of the three people.

Where did this failure happen?

Then find that individual or a small group of people, and the negative gets very targeted, but the praise is diluted across a group.

The other challenge here is what I like to call the telephone game of commitment.

You familiar with the telephone game?

Yes, unfortunately, the challenge with the telephone game is that not only does the message get distorted, but the level of importance gets distorted.

So when, let's say, hypothetically, I have an employee who wants a raise, and I say, I can't really do anything about that, but I'm going to talk to my boss or I'm going to talk to hr, I'm going to talk to somebody else about that.

It might be really heavy on my radar because it's really important to the person on my team and I want to go to bat for them.

So I raise it to somebody else and maybe a couple of people.

And because I expect them to remember and the employee expects me to remember, nothing really happens with it because while it's really important to my employee, it's important to me.

It's maybe one of a million other priorities for the leader that I've communicated with.

So that level of importance becomes lower.

Now, let's say, hypothetically, I left the organization.

Now that person thinks that commitment is living somewhere in the organization, and it's Gone.

It has been essentially forgotten.

That chain of neurons that was connecting the employee to that need has evaporated within the organization.

Or even if I as a leader just get distracted and I have a million things going on and I've got a crisis to respond to and I'm interviewing people, work just piles really quickly, I might forget about that or put it on the back burner for a little bit.

Meanwhile, that employee is out looking for another job and now they're gone.

Because it doesn't look like we followed through on our commitment.

Because that or the level of importance.

Yeah, because we behaved that way.

We did not create that strong memory connection to make this thing a priority to follow up or take action on whatever that thing was.

I would argue that most people who leave because of the feeling of lack of commitment or lack of follow through in an organization because they believe that they're not believed in strongly connected organizational memory.

Doctor K.: 00:23:10

Institutional memory, it definitely has its positives.

The retention, efficiency, collaboration, so forth and so forth.

However, it does have that negative kind of spin with it as well.

If, let's go with your example that someone says, hey, I want to talk about a raise, it gets put to their manager and then it gets lost in the ether.

If that becomes part of, I don't want to say part of the culture, but if we don't learn from that or an organization doesn't learn, oh my gosh, we lost this important person because through the telephone, it all got lost out there in the ether.

Then if we don't learn from that, we're just constantly spinning the same wheel.

We're not learning from that mistake.

So that means we're going to constantly, not positively, but we're constantly going to lose people that are important to our company.

And that just then you've got to retrain and that costs more money.

And then we lost people.

There's a whole lot of negativity that can come from the lack of institutional memory.

If you're constantly reinventing the wheel, nothing.

You never get to use the wheel to see what needs to be reinvented and.

Or if it's working just fine and then we can add new parts to it.

Just keeps going.

Doctor D.: 00:24:26

There are three reasons why I think organizations forget.

There's turnover and fragmented memory.

People come and go, they leave.

They have memories of things that happened and it goes with them.

When they go to another organization, that is called their experience and they bring their memories with them to a new organization.

But a piece of an organization leaves.

When a person does a piece of that memory, there's a bias towards present needs.

This institutional memory tends to prioritize immediate business objectives.

We tend to think about the things that are urgent and right in front of us rather than long term commitments to people or to projects or to ideas.

We tend to forget those things pretty easily.

I like to equate it to when you're driving in heavy, fast flowing traffic, you're not thinking about the good old days of when you were a kid.

You're very focused on the road.

You're thinking about when you're going to change lanes.

You're thinking about what's that car going to do in front of you.

You're not thinking about your childhood or you're not dreaming about aspirational things.

You're thinking very much in the present moment.

And the last reason is because we are all individual neurons in this memory pathway, there are competing memories.

When you and I, Dr. K, will have very different memories of the same situation, even though we might generally agree on the facts, we'll have different emotions, different feelings, different things because there are a lot of other contexts that happen around or it might be colored.

If you and I are in two different teams.

You're in software development and I'm in sales and marketing.

I may have committed to something that caused you to have to deliver something really fast because I made a promise to a customer and you ended up having to work several weekends to get that feature developed and released, or something like that.

We might both view that as a success, but we're going to have a very different perspective on why that happened and what that experience meant to each of us.

So these three different things are really, really challenging.

Do you have any other thoughts about individuals or people, why people forget or why institutions collectively forget?

Doctor K.: 00:26:47

I think institutions forget especially if they are progressing in a positive way.

I believe that they forget just because who wants to remember that?

Who wants to remember when we messed up on that project or who wants to remember when we had that whatever negative PR thing happened?

Nobody wants to remember those things, or I can't say nobody, but majority of people don't want to remember those things.

I think the tendency to forget makes the future a little bit more less scary because if you continue to remember, it's okay, but that could happen again.

And the importance of remembering maybe some of the negativity or the bad things that might have happened or the lessons that needed to be learned.

Is that just what I just said?

They are lessons that can be learned?

Yes.

Something might happen again in the future.

But then you're more prepared if you remember, oh my gosh, I remember that when we didn't get this one part done, it delayed our productivity.

What can we do to fix that?

It's not bad that we remember.

It's helping to move forward now.

Where it can be bad to always remember past experiences is if we let it become like that dark cloud that hangs over us.

Oh, we'll never.

God, this is what's going to happen again.

It always happens when we predict that it's always going to happen.

That's the problem.

Doctor D.: 00:28:20

When you tend to over index on the negative.

That's also an institutional memory problem.

You forget the successes, you forget how you overcame those challenges that you had last time.

There are some strategies that I use regularly in consulting with clients that I encourage them in their decision making process.

Which is first, before you make a decision, write down what the contributing factors are to that decision.

What were the things that you thought were going to happen?

Why did you decide to go this way?

What were the risks that you considered?

Because after you go back and make that decision, after some time you should reflect on the decision.

You should pull up that document and say, did my worries come true?

I was more worried.

Or did my worry not come true because we took some step to make sure that didn't happen in that decision making process.

And all the positives that I thought was going to happen from that, did those really happen?

A good reflection on the criteria and the thought process into your decision making, to go back and reflect on a decision is really important.

That leads to the second part.

Go back and reflect on a decision.

A lot of people make a decision and they just move on, put it in the past and they don't try to learn from what the positives and what the negatives were from that decision.

A good business case, that document of a decision making process.

I believe in the power of business cases and predicting, trying to predict what the outcome of a project, which is just a decision is going to be.

And so going back and reflecting and looking at that business case and saying, do we think this stuff came true?

Did we meet all of our objectives?

Did we hit all of the targets that we met from timeline and cost and functionality and features or benefits, whatever those might be, did we actually deliver on what we said we were going to do?

The decision might still be worth it even if the outcome wasn't as good, but you'll learn something from that and then you can take that into the next decision making process.

So whatever decision, thought process or business case that you put forward, you can say, okay, we way underestimated on cost for this and we way underestimated how long it was going to take.

And the next one, let's add 50% in cost, does it still make it worth it?

And let's add 50% in time, is it still going to be worth it?

And you can use that to adapt your future decision so that the goal is that your business case matches or the real life experiences matches or exceeds your business case.

From a benefit perspective, I'm going to.

Doctor K.: 00:30:55

Go more towards a looking at both the good and the bad.

Where did I go wrong again?

Being self aware.

Where did I go right?

Where did we go wrong?

Where did we go right?

I love the word that you used, reflection.

Because you're assessing what's going on.

Was this the right decision?

And if it is awesome, let's keep doing that.

Or if there's an area of improvement, awesome, keep doing that or do that.

The best part about assessing is again, we're gonna have to hold ourselves accountable or hold our team accountable.

But with the assessing or the reflection, we can go, oh, okay, I saw that worry was just nothing to worry about.

But this worry here, that not only was a worry, but continues to be a worry for these reasons.

And now we can bring in whatever resources or whatever changes or whatever is necessary to.

Sometimes worries don't ever fully go away.

But the amount of diminishing that worry is beneficial all around for the team, for the individual, for the product that we're putting out there.

Because if there's a worry, we can make more mistakes, the less of the worry or the concern, then that means we're on the right direction or we hope we're on the right direction.

Doctor D.: 00:32:13

And that really gets down to, I think, balanced storytelling.

How we communicate and reflect and talk about our own experiences or as leaders talk about the experiences of the team being very balanced and objective as much as you can to talk about the whole project or experience or decision that you're going through or performance in a very balanced way.

Here are things that we did really well.

Here are things that I wish we had done better.

Here are people who really contributed to the success of this.

I'm not saying everybody's name, but here are three or four people that come to mind that really added a lot of value.

And for those negative things, hey, we learned a lot too.

We learned that Experience X, you don't have to call a person out by name.

They will know that you're talking about it.

Experience X go like we would have planned, if we would have communicated a little bit better, we would have succeeded more as a team or these circumstances happened that led us to fall behind.

And being objective about and not just reflecting on the positive or just reflecting on the negative is much more balanced.

And that goes a long way when you're talking about performance reviews or communicating somebody feedback being very balanced and not overweighting the negatives or the positives in a conversation, but really thinking about the balance of that communication.

Doctor K.: 00:33:38

And I think people and institutions and organizations, they get scared of talk, they're happy to talk about the positives, but I think there is some fear base when it comes to talking about any negatives or challenges that came about because it may scare the team to start the next project or it might scare any new potential employees that you're bringing on.

It also might scare if you're going to the CEO and you're finally saying, okay, we got the project out and it worked out great, duh.

And there's a fear in there going, hey, by the way, though, these are all the successes, it was great.

But here are some challenges because we don't know what the person that we are bringing this to, how they're going to perceive it and take it.

However, I would say a good CEO or a good manager should look at that and go, that's awesome that you were able to see those challenges, you were able to work through them.

What are we going to do to minimize that challenge next round?

It's not a negative thing for people to acknowledge the challenges because everyone has challenges.

Every project has a challenge, every organization has challenges.

So if you pretend that they didn't exist, you're not going to go anywhere.

So the storytelling as you're saying, when we're presenting this to whoever needs it to be presented to, if they can hear that and they have that open mind of wow, that's awesome.

Because nothing ever goes perfect, nothing is ever seamlessly smooth.

Then that can show the power within the individuals, the team, the project, whatever it might be the organization.

Doctor D.: 00:35:20

Another thing that leaders can do within an organization is a knowledge audit, which where does your knowledge live?

Where does your decision making history live if it's not on paper, if you don't have it built into a process where you're capturing your risks and your concerns, or your business case up front and then reflecting on that later and you don't have a real written history that's easily accessible, or your processes are living in somebody's head, or your knowledge or Experience of particular customers are living in somebody's head, you are at real risk.

So taking and thinking about, hey, from a process perspective, from a decision making, from a history perspective, where does our knowledge live?

Who does that knowledge live with?

And try to capture it because things happen.

People win the lottery, they change jobs, they leave organizations, they retire.

Lots of reasons why knowledge walks out of your organization.

And if you have not done a knowledge assessment, which you should do every year or so to really figure out is knowledge being concentrated in one place, how do you do that?

Build some redundancy around it.

Make sure that processes documenting decision making exist that can really alleviate a lot of pressure around that concern, or that very serious underestimated risk of somebody leaving the organization.

Doctor K.: 00:36:45

It's important for people just to add on there that the past, whether it's negative or positive, can be, you can grow from that, you can learn, you can grow, you can change.

And past experiences that are negative don't always have to continue to affect or lead you in a certain way.

It also doesn't define the value of an individual, the value of a team, or the value of a company.

If there is, if a lesson is learned, or if there is, yeah, if the lessons are learned, it doesn't mean it doesn't take away from the value of someone, team or organization.

Doctor D.: 00:37:29

The old adage is the best predictor of future performance is past success.

But every next performance is completely independent of the past performance.

Every decision that you make in the future is completely uncoupled from the decisions that you've made in the past.

And hopefully if you've made a bad decision in the past, you can uncouple and move forward in a new way.

And that's true within businesses, for individuals, particularly in a work environment.

Walking into a performance review There are two things that I suggest that people do for performance planning and performance reviews throughout the year.

Number one is to have a copy of your job description printed out and make sure that if your job is evolving over time, that you're documenting that on your job description.

And when you have an annual performance review that is a part of the conversation, here is how my job has changed.

These things I don't do anymore, these things I do now or I still do all these things, and we've added on all these other things, it becomes a very data oriented perspective of here is how my job has changed.

The second thing is throughout the year to combat this recency bias is document all of your successes and all of your challenges and make sure that when you're walking in to a performance review or share with your boss or whoever's providing that performance review.

Here is a list of all my successes and here are all the challenges, how I overcame those challenges this year.

Provide that balanced storytelling, but have a complete and accurate storytelling of your whole year.

So that busy supervisor or manager or executive isn't only remembering what happened last week.

Give them a lot of data to advocate for yourself and make sure that they have it.

So a good job description with here's what's changed, here's what I don't do anymore, here's what I'm still doing, and here's what we've added and a really good history of what happened over the last year.

You are going to be amazed at how impactful that will be on your career growth.

Doctor K.: 00:39:40

And I'm going to just add just slightly to that before we get to the end.

Accountability will go a long way if you can be accountable for both your good and bad.

But real objective accountability, the emotions and all that stuff, no, the real objective accountability of what was done, what you've accomplished, where your challenges were and what you did to what you did or are trying to do to change or improve from those challenges again, as you said, will go a long way.

Doctor D.: 00:40:14

And maybe in the near future we will talk about how to advocate for yourself in performance reviews and career planning in that same way.

I think that would be a great topic that we cover.

Right.

Doctor K.: 00:40:25

Because people are always looking for that.

Because people do tend to, at least ones that I've worked with tend to get nervous.

And it's scary to say, oh, this is where I was wrong.

And it's also scary to say, this is where I kicked butt.

Doctor D.: 00:40:38

You don't want to feel like an egomaniac, but you also don't want to give people ammunition to shoot you down.

It's a very scary thing.

Dr. Kate, this was a really great discussion, had a lot of fun.

This is an area in decision making and biases that rings true for me.

So I appreciate the conversation.

Doctor K.: 00:40:55

I enjoyed it.

Doctor D.: 00:40:56

And to all of you, we hope you enjoyed the conversation as well.

And thank you all for joining us on this journey to the realm.

Thank you so much.

Doctor K.: 00:41:04

I'm Dr. D. And I'm Dr. K. And we are looking forward to your next visit to the executive realm.