Why is it that my company seems to make the exact same mistakes again and again, on one project after another?
Google “organizational learning,” and you'll find 4.5 million references. Search for “organizational forgetfulness,” and you'll find only a tenth as many. Not a scientific poll, surely, but it suggests that organizations do tend to repeat mistakes.
I just wrapped up a yearlong inquiry for an organization that lives and dies—often quite literally—based on its achievements in project management. It has been in business for about a century under various names, and had enjoyed so much success in fielding advanced technology projects that it was seen as the epitome of how to do things right.
That is, sadly, no longer the case, and we were commissioned to see what went wrong. How could an enterprise that managed projects so brilliantly for so long lose its way?
What we found surprised us. We did not discover a failure of organizational learning as much as a failure of organizational memory. We uncovered clear evidence that over its 100-year life, this institution had learned the lessons of project management numerous times. But the lessons were then forgotten, only to require relearning later, and at great cost.
In the corporate files, we found one letter from their CEO dated 1922, laying out the lessons he had learned over the previous five years. But if you could somehow have magically replaced that date with 2011, the letter would have fit today's situation perfectly: The problems and lessons of 90 years ago were exactly the same as those facing the organization today.
There are several causes of what I call “organizational amnesia,” the repeated loss of corporate memory:
1. Normal personnel turnover. It may not be coincidence that on average, the institution lost its bearings about every 20 years—which equates more or less to one generation. As each generation of leadership hands over control to the next, it should come as no surprise that the corporate memory takes a severe hit.
2. change in leadership priorities. Rarely do leaders—at any level—take over new positions, only to carry on the same priorities as their predecessors. More often, the departing leader's priority programs suffer through a period of benign neglect, until, after a politically palatable period of time, they are consigned to the scrap heap (or at least to a back burner).
What gets forgotten, though, is that those past leaders' programs and processes existed for a reason. Usually, they arose as a reaction to some past disaster, one now lost in the mists of organizational history. So incoming leaders kill off their predecessors' priority programs at their peril: No one will miss a forgotten process until the next catastrophe makes its original reason for existence depressingly obvious.
3. The special case of the discredited leader. Some institutional forgetfulness evolves slowly, but it can also happen at warp speed. In the organization we studied, a senior leader had been forced out in great public disgrace, doing severe damage to the reputation of the establishment. Not all of that leader's ideas were bad ones, but it didn't matter: His protégés and his policies were quickly and vigorously purged, no matter their merit, setting the stage for another round of organizational amnesia down the road.
4. Giving only lip service to lessons learned. Project management textbooks are full of examples of successful lessons-learned programs, and they do exist in real life. But an honest examination of most organizations reveals a much less optimistic view. Those of us who have been through project terminations know the myriad activities that result—including the quest for follow-on jobs for the project team—and those urgent tasks often take priority over well-intentioned activities like collecting, organizing and transmitting lessons learned to subsequent project teams.
Why does your company keep making the same mistakes over and over? I'll defer to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who summed it up far better than I can: “What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” PM
Bud Baker, PhD, is a professor of management at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, USA. Please send questions for Ask PM Network to [email protected].