To build long-term you have to remember long-term

Transactive memory is critical to high-performing teams. It’s also critical to high-performing organisations. I’m witnessing first-hand the impact of a lot of (perhaps too much) change at once.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 111:

When organizational incentives too strongly favor novelty and constant reinvention, it can make it harder for an organization to remember. Too much searching for shiny new things can be antithetical to learning. Why is this? The push to continually innovate can inadvertently suppress the incorporation of long-standing individual memory into collective memory. There’s an inherent tension between the drive for innovation, which often involves the creation of something new and untested, and learning from past experiences. For organizations, just as for individuals, memory consolidation takes time but is critical to learning. When there’s a constant drive toward newness, individuals within an organization may fail to take the time to consolidate their previous experiences.

[…]

Organizations that wish to learn and grow must cultivate a culture that balances innovation with incorporating the long memories of individuals into the collective memory. This could involve rewarding knowledge sharing, creating platforms for historical knowledge exchange, ensuring that new strategies are informed by past experiences, and a reward system that extends over an appropriate length of time. Done well, gardening an organization’s collective memory will help it to learn more quickly. In the long run, that’s the pathway to sustainable innovation.