MIT Sloan Management Review

Human Resource Management and Industrial Relations, Leadership and Organizational Studies

 

Managing Organizational Forgetting

By Pablo Martin de Holan, Nelson Phillips and Thomas B. Lawrence

January 15, 2004

Knowledge management is creating processes not just for learning and retaining what is important but also for avoiding or unlearning what is not.

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Over the last decade, companies have become increasingly aware of the value of managing their organizational knowledge, and researchers have investigated those processes extensively.1 Indeed, the ways in which organizations learn and have stocks of knowledge that underlie their capabilities can be a powerful tool in explaining the behavior and competitiveness of companies. Yet something is missing in the current discussions of organizational knowledge: Companies don’t just learn; they also forget.

Organizational forgetting is a critical and common phenomenon, but one that is not well understood. Forgetting, like learning, is not simple: It may be accidental or purposeful, detrimental or beneficial, but in all cases it can significantly affect the competitiveness of a company. Thus, along with organizational learning, businesses also need to manage processes to ensure that they forget any knowledge that must be discarded — and not forget knowledge that should be retained. In short, the management of organizational forgetting is a crucial task for at least two important reasons.

First, the involuntary loss of organizational knowledge is costing companies millions of dollars every year. Lost knowledge means forsaken capabilities and potentially decreased competitiveness. When a company finds itself in the situation of having to reinvent or buy knowledge it once had, resources are wasted. In that situation, not only is the time and money spent developing those skills lost, but... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

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