Learning about the Sins of Organizational Memory

In line with the overall theme of this year’s OLKC conference, this paper explores the terrain that is opened up when we re-view the concept of organizational memory through some of the recent thinking and research about the nature of individual memory. We argue that many researchers in the field of organizational memory have tended to overlook this fertile source of new ideas. It is our key contention and contribution that there are a range of problems in organizations that can be elucidated using individual memory-related concepts, and that understanding problems with respect to the functioning of individual memory helps us to also understand similar types of problem in an organizational setting. This re-viewing potentially provides fresh insights, new directions for future research, and represents a creative fusion between these two areas of research. In practice, we argue that it is an important first step is to be aware that organizational memory may be subject to deficiencies that plague individual memory. Future work may provide more detailed insights in how to deal with them.