Not much is new
On training manuals, Ayn Rand, and something Calvin Coolidge said 106 years ago that hasn't lost a shred of relevance today
Every organization, from the smallest mom-and-pop cafe to the world's most sophisticated military, depends heavily upon institutional memory: The knowledge held by the people who make up the institution. Most of that institutional memory in most organizations is retained informally, passed along through stories, apprentice-like relationships, and hard-won experience. In other cases, it's formally documented -- in training manuals, after-action reports, yearbooks, and corporate archives.
■ Well-run institutions treat this form of memory as a living resource. They study, document, and use their institutional knowledge, refining it and incorporating it into ongoing decision-making. Documentation is a sort of superpower: When it's done regularly and kept current as evolutionary progress is made, it allows the organization to become better and entrench those gains, even as old members leave and new ones are brought in.
■ Documentation is also vital to ensuring that people don't get out over their skis. Every generation and every line of human endeavor brings about a fresh crop of people who think they know better than everyone else because some seemingly new idea has occurred to them. It's an especially common trait of the young and intellectually gifted. (Who hasn't encountered an insufferable teenager who won't shut up after their first reading of Ayn Rand or Karl Marx?)
■ Clubs, private firms, government agencies and departments, charities, and NGOs with what we might call "living" programs for institutional memory can help to protect themselves from the damage these neophytes can do. Calvin Coolidge put it succinctly: "It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old and, because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new." And he said it more than a century ago, in 1919.
■ Very few ideas are really ever entirely new, and those who loudly and overconfidently represent themselves as the first to "discover" things are often merely novices who don't know how much they don't know. A living program of institutional memory won't always tone down the confidence of the zealous convert, but no organization should think itself immune to risk without making a deliberate effort to approach knowledge-keeping -- not just "what" and "how", but crucially "why" -- as an intrinsically important function.
