KEEGAN FURTADO shares a perspective on why organisations remember everything, except what they learnt
It was the third project review in eighteen months to arrive at exactly the same conclusion.
“We really need to document our learnings so we don’t repeat these mistakes,” someone said.
Everyone nodded. A workshop was organised. There were sticky notes, a whiteboard and enough coloured markers to suggest something significant was about to happen. Words such as root cause, learnings and way forward appeared with reassuring frequency. Someone volunteered to ‘institutionalise the learnings’, which sounded sufficiently impressive that nobody felt the need to ask what it actually meant.
By the end, there was a colour-coded action tracker, a beautifully formatted presentation and a document saved as Project Lessons Learnt FINAL v3 Updated.pptx.
Everyone left feeling rather pleased with themselves. Eight months later, the same problem happened again.
“Have we faced something like this before?” someone asked.
Silence.
Then Priya remembered. “I think Rajesh handled something similar.”
“Great. Can we check with Rajesh?”
“Rajesh left last year.”
And there, in one painfully familiar conversation, sits one of the great contradictions of the modern workplace. Organisations have never captured more information, yet somehow seem to remember less of it.
Welcome to the era of the Corporate Goldfish.
Think about how much information an organisation now records. Meetings are captured. Artificial intelligence produces summaries. Emails can be searched. Dashboards monitor almost everything. Microsoft Teams conversations sit patiently in channels. Projects have trackers, decisions have minutes, learning has repositories and knowledge has portals.
We have spent years solving the problem of access to information, and we have succeeded magnificently. Unfortunately, in my humble opinion, we have succeeded a little too well.
The average employee now begins the day with email, Teams, WhatsApp, dashboards, notifications and perhaps a “quick call” from someone who has apparently decided calendars are merely advisory. By 11 o’clock, they have processed enough information to qualify as a small broadcasting corporation.
The scarce resource in organisations is no longer information. It is attention.
And that changes everything.
We jump from meeting to message, message to email, email to dashboard, and dashboard straight into another meeting where someone shares a screen containing the email we were supposed to read between the previous two meetings.
Everything is important. Everything is urgent. Everything apparently requires “just five minutes”. – Nothing gets five minutes.
When attention is continually fragmented, information can be received without ever becoming knowledge. We saw the presentation. We attended the meeting. We even clicked the thumbs-up emoji. But six months later, ask why a particular decision was made and suddenly the entire organisation develops selective amnesia.
That is how the Corporate Goldfish is born.
Not because people have poor memories, but because very little stays in their attention long enough to become memorable. You can see the effect everywhere.
Employee surveys offer another wonderful example. In Year One, employees ask for clearer career paths. In Year Two, they ask for clearer career paths. In Year Three, they ask again. By Year Four, leadership proudly announces that “career clarity has emerged as a new theme.”
At some point, even the goldfish deserves an apology.
The funny part is that organisations are usually not short of the answer. Somewhere, there is a presentation containing it. There is probably a folder dedicated to it. There may even be a steering committee that discussed it for several months.
The problem is retrieving the lesson at the moment it matters.
This is where artificial intelligence could genuinely change organisational memory. Imagine beginning a new project and being told, “Three similar initiatives have been attempted before. Here is what worked, what failed and why.” Suddenly, institutional knowledge does not depend entirely on whether Rajesh still works here.
That is enormously valuable.
There is, however, a small complication. Artificial intelligence also allows us to create even more information. We can now generate a ten-page summary of a meeting that perhaps should not have existed in the first place. We can create reports, presentations, transcripts and action plans at breathtaking speed. Artificial intelligence could therefore become the organisation’s memory. Or it could simply give the goldfish a larger aquarium.
Perhaps the leadership challenge is no longer simply about communicating more. For years, the instinct has been more updates, more dashboards, more town halls, more channels and more messages. Maybe the better question is: what deserves attention?
What are the few things people genuinely need to remember? Which mistakes should never have to be learnt twice? Which decisions require their context to survive beyond the people who made them? And, perhaps most importantly, what can we stop communicating altogether?
Because clarity does not always come from adding another message. Sometimes it comes from removing ten. Organisational learning is not measured by how much knowledge we store. It is measured by whether that knowledge changes what we do next. A beautifully maintained repository that nobody visits is not institutional memory. It is digital storage with excellent branding.
The organisations that learn fastest may therefore not be the ones that capture everything. They may be the ones disciplined enough to decide what is worth remembering. Because somewhere right now, a team is probably holding a workshop to solve a problem another team solved three years ago.
The learnings were documented. The presentation still exists. The action tracker is beautifully colour-coded.
Unfortunately, Rajesh still has the context.
And Rajesh left last year.