The value and dangers of remembrance in changing worlds: a model of cognitive and operational memory of organizations (original) (raw)

This paper attempts to decompose and formalize the notion, characteristics and dynamics of remembrance of organizations in changing environments. Our model is conceptually based on the distributional nature of memory within organizations and the distinction between cognitive and operational parts of the memory. The two types of memory concern the organizational capabilities to "understand" the characteristics of the environment, on one hand, and to coordinate particular sequences of actions across different decision units and individuals, on the other, two tasks that become critical for organizations under changing environments. On the ground of our model we analyze: (i) the effects in terms of performances of different distributions of memory elements within the organization (e.g. whether hierarchically versus horizontally distributed, etc) conditional upon different characteristics of the environment, (ii) the conjecture that a memory structure well "fit" for a particular environment may turn out to be pernicious under different technological or market conditions and try to identify the circumstances under which "learning" implies primarily "intentional unlearning", (iii) the possibility of sort of "organizational cognitive dissonance" characterized by the mismatching between the mental models of the organization and its operational and (iv) the effects of shocks upon both operational and cognitive memories.