6 ms·

The value of institutional memory

197 points by leoc 1y ago

bolangi 1y ago
SpaceX does well on this front. There are four teams of workers at Boca Chica, working around the clock on 8-hour shifts that overlap. This helps continuity as well as sharing of knowhow.
freedomben 1y ago
Apologies for bring in "AI" to a non-AI thread, but I really do think that things will be a game changer for institutional memory, both at recording it and recovering it. I don't personally use them but I have many coworkers that use AI tools to join meetings and get summaries/transcriptions aftward that they can read or query (also using AI). As people get more used to it, I would imagine that sort of thing becomes standard practice (regardless of whether or not it should, but that's a different topic)
- saulpw 1y ago
  Except those summaries are deeply flawed and incorrect, so it's like having a secretary with memory loss and possibly dementia.
  - vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
    I assume this is a problem that's solvable. Personally I find the AI summaries quite useful
a_shovel 1y ago
I've heard this is part of why major infrastructure projects in America can be so expensive. A city builds one subway line, and everyone working on the project has no experience, so it takes a long time and is expensive. The expense convinces people to oppose any more projects, so the city doesn't build any public transit for a decade(s). By the time they're ready to build another line, all the experience has evaporated, so the new line takes a long time and is expensive. Repeat forever.
- antisthenes 1y ago
  That makes sense. It seems like during the continuous "building up America" period of the late 40s through mid 70s there was no problem of getting shit done at reasonable cost, because of continuously available institutional knowledge. Once large infrastructure projects become sporadic in nature, you begin to run into issues. The solution has to be continuous stimulus, but that also runs into problems of corruption and capture by special interests (the longer the stimulus, the more incentive there is for 3rd parties to appropriate funds).
  - stouset 1y ago
    Somehow, other nations have managed to figure this out. Of the developed world, seemingly only Americans are resigned to the belief that such things are sadly impossible.
    - convolvatron 1y ago
      the important part of the American system you're not addressing is that it makes sure no one accidentally gets something they don't really deserve.
      - lurk2 1y ago
        It has far more to do with respect for private property due to the existence of a class of sophisticated, politically literate professionals capable of opposing development. Europe and Canada are similar; the extent to which this retards the economy is more obvious in Europe. It isn’t hard to build a road when you can just expropriate all the land and completely disregard environmental impacts.
      - antisthenes 1y ago
        "no one" = poor people. All the old money already got a ton of wealth they didn't really deserve (conquest through Native american genocide)
      - ETH_start 1y ago
leoc 1y ago
Via "Coates" on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/oddthisday.bsky.social/post/3lvzzmj65s22p https://bsky.app/profile/oddthisday.bsky.social/post/3lvzzmj... at at Medum https://mulberryhall.medium.com/odd-this-day-5b1cfd1fdb32 https://mulberryhall.medium.com/odd-this-day-5b1cfd1fdb32 who provides some other information: > What happened next, you may not be surprised to hear, comes in different versions. The person who spotted that there might be a problem may have been a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary… >> While they were away, a passing policeman noticed an extraordinary whirlpool in the normally placid canal. He also noticed that the water level was falling. He rushed off to find the dredging gang. By the time they all returned, the canal had disappeared. It was then that realisation dawned. Jack and his men had pulled out the plug of the canal. One-and-a-half miles of waterway had gone down the drain. > It may have been three anglers who raised the alarm, and given that they have names — Howard Poucher, Graham Boon and Pete Moxon — maybe that version’s true. Another telling says it wasn’t until the evening that >> local police contacted Stuart Robinson, the British Waterways section inspector.
- notahacker 1y ago
  Other relevant context: sections of UK canals being unintentional drained isn't particularly unusual, although the culprit is usually a paddle left open on a lock gate or a leaky culvert rather than a plug being pulled. Whether that inconveniences anyone for any length of time depends mostly on how full the reservoirs at the top end of the canal are... Wouldn't have been that unusual in 1972 when nearly all the canals including that one had ceased commercial operations and many of them had been intentionally drained either. I suspect the transition from the canal being infrastructure maintained by locally-stationed full time professionals to a pleasure cruiseway which the new waterways board was willing to devote a bit of time to maintaining only after the previous one had spent several years trying to get it shut down probably had as much impact as the Blitz on the work crew having no idea about plugholes...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 1y ago
This misses something very important. Institutional memory is not information or documents - it's people. Every single real-world process has implicit knowledge. And you can't always capture that knowledge of paper. But, many corporations seem to want to get rid of their most experienced people to save money and have better quarterly results for the stock market.
- phkahler 1y ago
  Yes, I think people create more internal documentation then they read.
- antithesizer 1y ago
  It can be documents and it can be people, but it's not essentially either one. It can take many forms, including being lost when none of those forms has it on offer, as every business is different. An institution with excellent documentation, mature processes, and adept hiring could retain its "memory" without a single human member remaining from the past. Oral history and other humanistic forms of memory make everyone feel warm and fuzzy, but they're not to be idealized as the only real memory simply because they were underappreciated for a some time.
- stackbutterflow 1y ago
  For instance TSMC is discussed a lot on HN and every time I'm thinking that even TSMC itself probably couldn't produce their latest chips if they had to start from scratch tomorrow.
tolerance 1y ago
Perhaps tangentially related Re: “Chesterfield’s plug", Chesterton’s fence came to mind today while mulling over this sort of “forgetfulness” (which tends toward outright negligence) in my own circles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_... Solid writing.
Pingk 1y ago
This is often made worse as a result of hiring outside consultants. Firstly they don't have the institutional knowledge you have when starting a project, but they also aren't incentivised to properly document and hand over their knowledge at the end since that means less future work. This is why a lot of government projects take so long, they don't see the value in keeping an in-house team of trained experts (see the difference in train line contruction costs in the UK compared to Spain), until you realised how good they were but you can't hire them back.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  That’s a great point. In my city, they started paving side streets with with in-house staff. They have dedicated funded budget, government can borrow cheaply, and they don’t need to price risk and margin. Over 5 years, they spend 30-40% less depending on utilization of equipment. (We had a two slow years due to pandemic and weather) For the work that’s funded by state aid or grants, they use contractors as its a variable workload.
- ahi 1y ago
  I am currently on a team of consultants. Ironically, most of us have more institutional knowledge than the client due to internal churn. Seems like every few years they try to cut our utilization in favor of some off-shore company that's "cheaper", the project blows up, then we have to jump in and save some middle manager's job.
- profsummergig 1y ago
  Back when Anderson Consulting hadn't yet disgraced itself, a corp I worked for hired them for a cost-cutting project. "Find ways we can cut costs." Blew my mind that 22-year olds, fresh out of good-brand universities (their "qualification"), were doing the research on how to cost-cut. Chesterton's fences all over the place were violated. It was sad watching the slow-moving disaster.
BJones12 1y ago
I suspect this is why it's good for the USA to be constantly at war. If you're only at war occasionally, you forget how to make war and can lose. If you're at war constantly, you'll remember how to do it.
- jppope 1y ago
  Tragically, there is some truth to this.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- kayodelycaon 1y ago
  This is why the US Army did so much humanitarian relief. Their logistics infrastructure was constantly in use. To some people, it looks like a lot of wasted money.
  - bell-cot 1y ago
    To judge by the US Army's on-line official histories - they have considerable institutional memory of how much better it is to fight when the locals view you positively, vs. negatively.
lordnacho 1y ago
Too much emphasis on documentation. It's people that matter. If you build the sort of culture where people hang around, they will occasionally have time to tell each other the internal folklore. "When I started, an old guy told me about the plug under the canal". People who work with software know this. Yeah, there are documents describing the system. No, reading them does not mean you understand the system. Alas, it's an intangible, and doesn't get counted with the rest of the beans.
antithesizer 1y ago
This is one reason why what ServiceNow does is so important.
Nevermark 1y ago
I had long term business relationship with a company, originating and developing a product for them. From 50 - 1000 employees things worked very well. There was a great deal of continuity in the relationship. Lots of trust and flexibility in both directions. Our product quickly became the best available, by a long margin, and for a couple decades. But after they passed about 1500 - 2000 employees they got more organized. A formalized organization and process system. Things quickly went downhill. As someone working from outside the company, their processes were incredibly disruptive and inefficient for me. Likewise, their turnover replaced a situation of working with long time friendly colleagues, who knew me very well, to working with people who had no idea what my positive reputation was, my track record of delivering quality without the hammer of conformance, etc. The project's ambitious upward trajectory stalled. Even then it took about ten years to fall behind other players. But it never recovered. Today it operates deep in the shadows of others. Virtually every employee I worked with was wonderful, inclined to be as supportive as restrictions allowed, etc. But the institutionalization smothered the organizations ability to operate with any flexibility, no matter how dysfunctional or value destroying the results. The company became like someone who has permanently lost the ability to form new memories. You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  Sorry to hear this. It's such a tricky thing for an org to balance, if not impossible. One thing I notice is it's very easy to add additional layers of relatively small actual value that look like lots of value. So you might say you've earned a degree of respect by working consistently for years, and people don't mind that you don't always update your status reports. But then if you don't defend vigorously in the org, someone might come in who does very little work in terms of company output, but always gets your status reports in and reports up the chain so you "don't have to". And that looks like value to the person above, but it wasn't really. And now you have a new boss.
- throwaway13337 1y ago
  >You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up. Was that an LLM reference or is it the myopia in me? There's a parallel here, either way. All the documentation in the world will not make a person, or llm session interchangable. In some sense the new way of coding feels like building a big org with people without memory. If you can document the process perfectly, there is a holy grail out there somewhere. Or maybe there isn't.
paulorlando 1y ago
That story is very Chesterton Fence. If Chesterton was working in a canal instead of walking on a country path. There's a balance between preserving memory and maintaining and benefitting from that knowledge and choosing what not to remember. When Kurt Cobain shot and killed himself in 1994, his widow went on TV to say that what he did was wrong. Cobain’s death then did not result in others’ killing themselves (known as the “Werther effect”). Robin William’s suicide 20 years later, however, did result in more deaths as the story spread widely. But otherwise, I do agree that we should preserve institutional memory and that putting processes over people can lead to forgetting.
stego-tech 1y ago
This is one of the biggest consequences of layoffs in corporations. There's this misconception that everything can and is "objectively" quantified, and thus layoffs targeting otherwise well-performing individuals are being done because this will quantifiably save the institution money and resources. Then something inevitably happens where someone they previously let go could've saved the cost of their employment and then some in damages, but the company is often too blind to realize this. Thing is, I've seen this time and time again. A lot of us have, I suspect, seen this story repeatedly in our own current or prior organizations. Someone who worked for the company for a decade, or who had intricate knowledge of prior M&As, technology stacks, codebases, customers, and/or processes who was thrown out as a line on a spreadsheet. I do my best to buck the trend in my work by documenting everything (the "bus problem", as I call it) I can and sharing it with my colleagues, but the continuous churn of M&As and software deprecation means that documentation is often discarded with old systems rather than reviewed and preserved, thus further erasing any lingering institutional memory. To be fair, this issue isn't likely to kill a company outright on its own. Sure, it could lead to a serious problem and cost gobs of money, but it rarely kills a company or project outright in the process. Still, it's preventable harm just by keeping some additional persons around for knowledge or managing an organizational library of content. It's ultimately such a minor cost in the grand scheme of things that shareholders won't really care. $1m a year for a corporate library and a handful of staff to support it is peanuts on a multi-billion dollar enterprise balance sheet, and will almost certainly improve outcomes across the organization as a whole. Or to put it far more simply: institutional memory is the fat on an animal. Cutting fat down to the bone leaves the animal weaker and vulnerable as a result, as it has no emergency stores of energy (or in this case, knowledge) to pull from and thus must cannibalize itself in times of crisis.
- Zigurd 1y ago
  I call this "process arbitrage." Until the most recent CEO, Boeing was ruined by this. They have extremely well documented processes. So you can fire the people that understand the reasons behind those processes, and the ghost of their expertise lingers. For a while. This starts out looking very attractive because you've cut costs and your profitability is up. Then it all suddenly goes to shit and your planes crash.
hermitcrab 1y ago
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story of cars being specified to understand a 100kmh air speed on the rear windscreen. 'Ridiculous, it can't reverse at more than 30kmh said the car designers' and ignored the spec. The first time new cars were transported on a train, all the rear windscreens blew in. A long time ago I worked on a software product to try to record design decisions in the creation of long-lived artefacts, such as nuclear reactors. The idea being that engineers looking to make a change 20+ years later (when the original engineers had retired) would understand why something had been designed the way it had. The project was not a success, despite some initial enthusiasm from some commercial sponsors. I think this was due to 2 main issues: a) The software infrastructure of the days wasn't really up to it. This was just before wikis, intranets etc, which would have made everything a lot easier. b) The engineers working on the design had no incentive to record the rationale of their decisions. It was extra work with no benefit for them (any benefit was by someone else, years down the line). In fact it could make it more likely for them to be held liable for a bad decision. And, in an age of cheap outsourcing, it could reduce their job security. The second problem was by far the more important and I don't know how you get around it.
- pbronez 1y ago
  You have to start thinking about product as the entire provenance chain, not just the end product. That means nobody gets paid for a working reactor. They only get paid for a working AND DOCUMENTED reactor. Related, you have to make it benefit the current generation of engineers as well. Want to get your thing built? Deliver your designs in format X, which also happens to support long term reference. None of this is easy… but it is actually possible to align incentives like this. You just have to do it from very high up, and with a very firm hand.
  - hermitcrab 1y ago
    >They only get paid for a working AND DOCUMENTED reactor. Unfortunately that is rather easy to game. Especially in an age of LLMs.
    - 1y ago
purplezooey 1y ago
It seems that a lot of businesses barely function. They're often stuffed with overpaid executives while the actual business wheezes along, barely managing to get its product out the door. More attention is usually paid to reducing competition, increasing one's moat, and restricting supply, so customers have little choice, as in the aerospace industry from this article.
dan-robertson 1y ago
A few thoughts: 1. Institutional memory does seem important. It feels like lots of government things are bad at this – big infrastructure projects tend to come in occasional bursts which means each time they are learning from scratch; Japan moves lots of civil servants around every few years which means that no one really remembers how to do things. 2. I think there is a negative side of this too, a kind of ‘institutional trauma’ where some bad memory can cripple an institution. Eg one reason Microsoft lost so much to Google in the early Internet was the memory of the late ’90s antitrust action making them less aggressive. Other companies can have one particular close shave which then causes them to focus too much on avoiding a repeat, a situation you also see writ small in tech teams. 3. I think a bit about production incidents in tech too here. When things are small and the systems are relatively new and they break a lot, this may be ok for the business and recovery can hopefully be fast because it is possible to quickly hypothesise / fix stupid problems. When most silly bugs have been squashed and systems are big and reliable, problems can snowball faster, the business may be more sad about them happening, people can’t understand the whole picture well enough to have good ideas, and the lower base rate of incidents means people will be more stressed or otherwise unable to focus on the actual problem
- Spooky23 1y ago
  There’s a balance to these things. I worked for a well run large government bureaucracy that was both confounding and frustrating and great at execution. The organization executed the mission very well. They had solid process and controls. They knew why they had the controls. People were really smart and motivated. The confounding part was that any change was impossible because there was an expectation of that level of rigor for new things. Literally took a year to approve using Google.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I worked for a 100-year-old Japanese optical equipment manufacturer. It had a lot of institutional memory (detractors like to call it “tribal memory.” I guess, because it makes it sound more primitive). Lots of “wise old men,” lots of rituals, and “we just do things this way” practices. Long apprenticeships, tons of training, and a metric shitton of paper trails. But I could always get an explanation for why something was the way it was. Not many Chesterton’s Fences, and some damn interesting stories. It could be maddening, especially for a software engineering manager (Yours Truly), but they got outstanding results. In fact, they suffered some real damage, when they tried to leave a lot of that behind, and have since returned to “the old ways.”
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  That's fascinating. I really do like that you found that you could get an explanation for everything. It's a real problem for any culture when the explanations for why things are are either forgotten or actively suppressed. This is what tradition means. Sadly, in recent history, tradition has been attacked as thoughtless, if quaint convention, and discarded without prior investigation when it stands in the way of something someone wants. This view makes it easier to discard it in order to fill the void with something else; power becomes the rule. And sure, most people do follow convention without a deeper or thorough grasp of its reasons -- it is difficult to expect too much from the average person in this regard -- but part of what a cultural elite is for is to maintain tradition, to transmit it to the next generation along with its explanations, so that it can develop, so that it avoid both the calcification into mere empty convention as well as the loss of the wisdom that constitutes is. A cultural elite acts like a kind of referee to modulate cultural developments in light of prior knowledge.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    The most interesting thing, was that most folks could answer without looking it up. In that company, age was actually celebrated and respected (kind of alien, to Silicon Valley).
JR1427 1y ago
"Never remove what you don't understand" also springs to mind.
EdwardCoffin 1y ago
This reminded me of Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011) [1] which has been most recently discussed here, here [2]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111228105122/http://wrttn.in/04af1a https://web.archive.org/web/20111228105122/http://wrttn.in/0... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235452

197 points by leoc 1y ago

SpaceX does well on this front. There are four teams of workers at Boca Chica, working around the clock on 8-hour shifts that overlap. This helps continuity as well as sharing of knowhow.

freedomben 1y ago

Apologies for bring in "AI" to a non-AI thread, but I really do think that things will be a game changer for institutional memory, both at recording it and recovering it. I don't personally use them but I have many coworkers that use AI tools to join meetings and get summaries/transcriptions aftward that they can read or query (also using AI). As people get more used to it, I would imagine that sort of thing becomes standard practice (regardless of whether or not it should, but that's a different topic)

saulpw 1y ago
Except those summaries are deeply flawed and incorrect, so it's like having a secretary with memory loss and possibly dementia.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  I assume this is a problem that's solvable. Personally I find the AI summaries quite useful

a_shovel 1y ago

I've heard this is part of why major infrastructure projects in America can be so expensive. A city builds one subway line, and everyone working on the project has no experience, so it takes a long time and is expensive. The expense convinces people to oppose any more projects, so the city doesn't build any public transit for a decade(s). By the time they're ready to build another line, all the experience has evaporated, so the new line takes a long time and is expensive. Repeat forever.

antisthenes 1y ago
That makes sense. It seems like during the continuous "building up America" period of the late 40s through mid 70s there was no problem of getting shit done at reasonable cost, because of continuously available institutional knowledge. Once large infrastructure projects become sporadic in nature, you begin to run into issues. The solution has to be continuous stimulus, but that also runs into problems of corruption and capture by special interests (the longer the stimulus, the more incentive there is for 3rd parties to appropriate funds).
- stouset 1y ago
  Somehow, other nations have managed to figure this out. Of the developed world, seemingly only Americans are resigned to the belief that such things are sadly impossible.
  - convolvatron 1y ago
    the important part of the American system you're not addressing is that it makes sure no one accidentally gets something they don't really deserve.
    - lurk2 1y ago
      It has far more to do with respect for private property due to the existence of a class of sophisticated, politically literate professionals capable of opposing development. Europe and Canada are similar; the extent to which this retards the economy is more obvious in Europe. It isn’t hard to build a road when you can just expropriate all the land and completely disregard environmental impacts.
    - antisthenes 1y ago
      "no one" = poor people. All the old money already got a ton of wealth they didn't really deserve (conquest through Native american genocide)
    - ETH_start 1y ago

leoc 1y ago

Via "Coates" on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/oddthisday.bsky.social/post/3lvzzmj65s22p https://bsky.app/profile/oddthisday.bsky.social/post/3lvzzmj... at at Medum https://mulberryhall.medium.com/odd-this-day-5b1cfd1fdb32 https://mulberryhall.medium.com/odd-this-day-5b1cfd1fdb32 who provides some other information: > What happened next, you may not be surprised to hear, comes in different versions. The person who spotted that there might be a problem may have been a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary… >> While they were away, a passing policeman noticed an extraordinary whirlpool in the normally placid canal. He also noticed that the water level was falling. He rushed off to find the dredging gang. By the time they all returned, the canal had disappeared. It was then that realisation dawned. Jack and his men had pulled out the plug of the canal. One-and-a-half miles of waterway had gone down the drain. > It may have been three anglers who raised the alarm, and given that they have names — Howard Poucher, Graham Boon and Pete Moxon — maybe that version’s true. Another telling says it wasn’t until the evening that >> local police contacted Stuart Robinson, the British Waterways section inspector.

notahacker 1y ago
Other relevant context: sections of UK canals being unintentional drained isn't particularly unusual, although the culprit is usually a paddle left open on a lock gate or a leaky culvert rather than a plug being pulled. Whether that inconveniences anyone for any length of time depends mostly on how full the reservoirs at the top end of the canal are... Wouldn't have been that unusual in 1972 when nearly all the canals including that one had ceased commercial operations and many of them had been intentionally drained either. I suspect the transition from the canal being infrastructure maintained by locally-stationed full time professionals to a pleasure cruiseway which the new waterways board was willing to devote a bit of time to maintaining only after the previous one had spent several years trying to get it shut down probably had as much impact as the Blitz on the work crew having no idea about plugholes...
deleted 1y ago
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 1y ago

This misses something very important. Institutional memory is not information or documents - it's people. Every single real-world process has implicit knowledge. And you can't always capture that knowledge of paper. But, many corporations seem to want to get rid of their most experienced people to save money and have better quarterly results for the stock market.

phkahler 1y ago
Yes, I think people create more internal documentation then they read.
antithesizer 1y ago
It can be documents and it can be people, but it's not essentially either one. It can take many forms, including being lost when none of those forms has it on offer, as every business is different. An institution with excellent documentation, mature processes, and adept hiring could retain its "memory" without a single human member remaining from the past. Oral history and other humanistic forms of memory make everyone feel warm and fuzzy, but they're not to be idealized as the only real memory simply because they were underappreciated for a some time.
stackbutterflow 1y ago
For instance TSMC is discussed a lot on HN and every time I'm thinking that even TSMC itself probably couldn't produce their latest chips if they had to start from scratch tomorrow.

tolerance 1y ago

Perhaps tangentially related Re: “Chesterfield’s plug", Chesterton’s fence came to mind today while mulling over this sort of “forgetfulness” (which tends toward outright negligence) in my own circles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_... Solid writing.

Pingk 1y ago

This is often made worse as a result of hiring outside consultants. Firstly they don't have the institutional knowledge you have when starting a project, but they also aren't incentivised to properly document and hand over their knowledge at the end since that means less future work. This is why a lot of government projects take so long, they don't see the value in keeping an in-house team of trained experts (see the difference in train line contruction costs in the UK compared to Spain), until you realised how good they were but you can't hire them back.

Spooky23 1y ago
That’s a great point. In my city, they started paving side streets with with in-house staff. They have dedicated funded budget, government can borrow cheaply, and they don’t need to price risk and margin. Over 5 years, they spend 30-40% less depending on utilization of equipment. (We had a two slow years due to pandemic and weather) For the work that’s funded by state aid or grants, they use contractors as its a variable workload.
ahi 1y ago
I am currently on a team of consultants. Ironically, most of us have more institutional knowledge than the client due to internal churn. Seems like every few years they try to cut our utilization in favor of some off-shore company that's "cheaper", the project blows up, then we have to jump in and save some middle manager's job.
profsummergig 1y ago
Back when Anderson Consulting hadn't yet disgraced itself, a corp I worked for hired them for a cost-cutting project. "Find ways we can cut costs." Blew my mind that 22-year olds, fresh out of good-brand universities (their "qualification"), were doing the research on how to cost-cut. Chesterton's fences all over the place were violated. It was sad watching the slow-moving disaster.

BJones12 1y ago

I suspect this is why it's good for the USA to be constantly at war. If you're only at war occasionally, you forget how to make war and can lose. If you're at war constantly, you'll remember how to do it.

jppope 1y ago
Tragically, there is some truth to this.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
kayodelycaon 1y ago
This is why the US Army did so much humanitarian relief. Their logistics infrastructure was constantly in use. To some people, it looks like a lot of wasted money.
- bell-cot 1y ago
  To judge by the US Army's on-line official histories - they have considerable institutional memory of how much better it is to fight when the locals view you positively, vs. negatively.

lordnacho 1y ago

Too much emphasis on documentation. It's people that matter. If you build the sort of culture where people hang around, they will occasionally have time to tell each other the internal folklore. "When I started, an old guy told me about the plug under the canal". People who work with software know this. Yeah, there are documents describing the system. No, reading them does not mean you understand the system. Alas, it's an intangible, and doesn't get counted with the rest of the beans.

antithesizer 1y ago

This is one reason why what ServiceNow does is so important.

Nevermark 1y ago

I had long term business relationship with a company, originating and developing a product for them. From 50 - 1000 employees things worked very well. There was a great deal of continuity in the relationship. Lots of trust and flexibility in both directions. Our product quickly became the best available, by a long margin, and for a couple decades. But after they passed about 1500 - 2000 employees they got more organized. A formalized organization and process system. Things quickly went downhill. As someone working from outside the company, their processes were incredibly disruptive and inefficient for me. Likewise, their turnover replaced a situation of working with long time friendly colleagues, who knew me very well, to working with people who had no idea what my positive reputation was, my track record of delivering quality without the hammer of conformance, etc. The project's ambitious upward trajectory stalled. Even then it took about ten years to fall behind other players. But it never recovered. Today it operates deep in the shadows of others. Virtually every employee I worked with was wonderful, inclined to be as supportive as restrictions allowed, etc. But the institutionalization smothered the organizations ability to operate with any flexibility, no matter how dysfunctional or value destroying the results. The company became like someone who has permanently lost the ability to form new memories. You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up.

robertlagrant 1y ago
Sorry to hear this. It's such a tricky thing for an org to balance, if not impossible. One thing I notice is it's very easy to add additional layers of relatively small actual value that look like lots of value. So you might say you've earned a degree of respect by working consistently for years, and people don't mind that you don't always update your status reports. But then if you don't defend vigorously in the org, someone might come in who does very little work in terms of company output, but always gets your status reports in and reports up the chain so you "don't have to". And that looks like value to the person above, but it wasn't really. And now you have a new boss.
throwaway13337 1y ago
>You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up. Was that an LLM reference or is it the myopia in me? There's a parallel here, either way. All the documentation in the world will not make a person, or llm session interchangable. In some sense the new way of coding feels like building a big org with people without memory. If you can document the process perfectly, there is a holy grail out there somewhere. Or maybe there isn't.

paulorlando 1y ago

That story is very Chesterton Fence. If Chesterton was working in a canal instead of walking on a country path. There's a balance between preserving memory and maintaining and benefitting from that knowledge and choosing what not to remember. When Kurt Cobain shot and killed himself in 1994, his widow went on TV to say that what he did was wrong. Cobain’s death then did not result in others’ killing themselves (known as the “Werther effect”). Robin William’s suicide 20 years later, however, did result in more deaths as the story spread widely. But otherwise, I do agree that we should preserve institutional memory and that putting processes over people can lead to forgetting.

stego-tech 1y ago

This is one of the biggest consequences of layoffs in corporations. There's this misconception that everything can and is "objectively" quantified, and thus layoffs targeting otherwise well-performing individuals are being done because this will quantifiably save the institution money and resources. Then something inevitably happens where someone they previously let go could've saved the cost of their employment and then some in damages, but the company is often too blind to realize this. Thing is, I've seen this time and time again. A lot of us have, I suspect, seen this story repeatedly in our own current or prior organizations. Someone who worked for the company for a decade, or who had intricate knowledge of prior M&As, technology stacks, codebases, customers, and/or processes who was thrown out as a line on a spreadsheet. I do my best to buck the trend in my work by documenting everything (the "bus problem", as I call it) I can and sharing it with my colleagues, but the continuous churn of M&As and software deprecation means that documentation is often discarded with old systems rather than reviewed and preserved, thus further erasing any lingering institutional memory. To be fair, this issue isn't likely to kill a company outright on its own. Sure, it could lead to a serious problem and cost gobs of money, but it rarely kills a company or project outright in the process. Still, it's preventable harm just by keeping some additional persons around for knowledge or managing an organizational library of content. It's ultimately such a minor cost in the grand scheme of things that shareholders won't really care. $1m a year for a corporate library and a handful of staff to support it is peanuts on a multi-billion dollar enterprise balance sheet, and will almost certainly improve outcomes across the organization as a whole. Or to put it far more simply: institutional memory is the fat on an animal. Cutting fat down to the bone leaves the animal weaker and vulnerable as a result, as it has no emergency stores of energy (or in this case, knowledge) to pull from and thus must cannibalize itself in times of crisis.

Zigurd 1y ago
I call this "process arbitrage." Until the most recent CEO, Boeing was ruined by this. They have extremely well documented processes. So you can fire the people that understand the reasons behind those processes, and the ghost of their expertise lingers. For a while. This starts out looking very attractive because you've cut costs and your profitability is up. Then it all suddenly goes to shit and your planes crash.

hermitcrab 1y ago

There is a (possibly apocryphal) story of cars being specified to understand a 100kmh air speed on the rear windscreen. 'Ridiculous, it can't reverse at more than 30kmh said the car designers' and ignored the spec. The first time new cars were transported on a train, all the rear windscreens blew in. A long time ago I worked on a software product to try to record design decisions in the creation of long-lived artefacts, such as nuclear reactors. The idea being that engineers looking to make a change 20+ years later (when the original engineers had retired) would understand why something had been designed the way it had. The project was not a success, despite some initial enthusiasm from some commercial sponsors. I think this was due to 2 main issues: a) The software infrastructure of the days wasn't really up to it. This was just before wikis, intranets etc, which would have made everything a lot easier. b) The engineers working on the design had no incentive to record the rationale of their decisions. It was extra work with no benefit for them (any benefit was by someone else, years down the line). In fact it could make it more likely for them to be held liable for a bad decision. And, in an age of cheap outsourcing, it could reduce their job security. The second problem was by far the more important and I don't know how you get around it.

pbronez 1y ago
You have to start thinking about product as the entire provenance chain, not just the end product. That means nobody gets paid for a working reactor. They only get paid for a working AND DOCUMENTED reactor. Related, you have to make it benefit the current generation of engineers as well. Want to get your thing built? Deliver your designs in format X, which also happens to support long term reference. None of this is easy… but it is actually possible to align incentives like this. You just have to do it from very high up, and with a very firm hand.
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  >They only get paid for a working AND DOCUMENTED reactor. Unfortunately that is rather easy to game. Especially in an age of LLMs.
  - 1y ago

purplezooey 1y ago

It seems that a lot of businesses barely function. They're often stuffed with overpaid executives while the actual business wheezes along, barely managing to get its product out the door. More attention is usually paid to reducing competition, increasing one's moat, and restricting supply, so customers have little choice, as in the aerospace industry from this article.

dan-robertson 1y ago

A few thoughts: 1. Institutional memory does seem important. It feels like lots of government things are bad at this – big infrastructure projects tend to come in occasional bursts which means each time they are learning from scratch; Japan moves lots of civil servants around every few years which means that no one really remembers how to do things. 2. I think there is a negative side of this too, a kind of ‘institutional trauma’ where some bad memory can cripple an institution. Eg one reason Microsoft lost so much to Google in the early Internet was the memory of the late ’90s antitrust action making them less aggressive. Other companies can have one particular close shave which then causes them to focus too much on avoiding a repeat, a situation you also see writ small in tech teams. 3. I think a bit about production incidents in tech too here. When things are small and the systems are relatively new and they break a lot, this may be ok for the business and recovery can hopefully be fast because it is possible to quickly hypothesise / fix stupid problems. When most silly bugs have been squashed and systems are big and reliable, problems can snowball faster, the business may be more sad about them happening, people can’t understand the whole picture well enough to have good ideas, and the lower base rate of incidents means people will be more stressed or otherwise unable to focus on the actual problem

Spooky23 1y ago
There’s a balance to these things. I worked for a well run large government bureaucracy that was both confounding and frustrating and great at execution. The organization executed the mission very well. They had solid process and controls. They knew why they had the controls. People were really smart and motivated. The confounding part was that any change was impossible because there was an expectation of that level of rigor for new things. Literally took a year to approve using Google.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I worked for a 100-year-old Japanese optical equipment manufacturer. It had a lot of institutional memory (detractors like to call it “tribal memory.” I guess, because it makes it sound more primitive). Lots of “wise old men,” lots of rituals, and “we just do things this way” practices. Long apprenticeships, tons of training, and a metric shitton of paper trails. But I could always get an explanation for why something was the way it was. Not many Chesterton’s Fences, and some damn interesting stories. It could be maddening, especially for a software engineering manager (Yours Truly), but they got outstanding results. In fact, they suffered some real damage, when they tried to leave a lot of that behind, and have since returned to “the old ways.”

lo_zamoyski 1y ago
That's fascinating. I really do like that you found that you could get an explanation for everything. It's a real problem for any culture when the explanations for why things are are either forgotten or actively suppressed. This is what tradition means. Sadly, in recent history, tradition has been attacked as thoughtless, if quaint convention, and discarded without prior investigation when it stands in the way of something someone wants. This view makes it easier to discard it in order to fill the void with something else; power becomes the rule. And sure, most people do follow convention without a deeper or thorough grasp of its reasons -- it is difficult to expect too much from the average person in this regard -- but part of what a cultural elite is for is to maintain tradition, to transmit it to the next generation along with its explanations, so that it can develop, so that it avoid both the calcification into mere empty convention as well as the loss of the wisdom that constitutes is. A cultural elite acts like a kind of referee to modulate cultural developments in light of prior knowledge.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  The most interesting thing, was that most folks could answer without looking it up. In that company, age was actually celebrated and respected (kind of alien, to Silicon Valley).

JR1427 1y ago

"Never remove what you don't understand" also springs to mind.

EdwardCoffin 1y ago

This reminded me of Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011) [1] which has been most recently discussed here, here [2]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111228105122/http://wrttn.in/04af1a https://web.archive.org/web/20111228105122/http://wrttn.in/0... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235452