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Sometimes I wonder if work is just an ever growing pile of forgotten initiatives. The organisational memory can sometimes seem to be just two to three years.
Partly this is a result of short-termism. Many of our social institutions and non-profits unquestionably adopted the playbook of the corporate world: a focus on the a ‘year-end’ for finalising financial records, assessing progress against goals, and setting budgets for the upcoming year.
Too often this has driven a transactional mindset, ticking boxes and gathering data. Data that is then turned into a KPI, a target. Human voices reduced to numbers.
These metrics and analytics appear to offer a quantifiable path to progress, but what happens when we become so fixated on the numbers that we forget the humans behind them?
Our purpose – the reason we exist – can become servant to a metric. The work becomes a metric, and then the metrics become the work.
One of the problems, as I discussed with Rob Rowlands and Andy Wright in a recent episode of the Let’s Talk Ideas, is that metrics can often encourage a short term view of long term societal problems.
People have longer memories than our institutions.
Corporate amnesia or ‘institutional forgetting’ is a phenomenon where organisations lose valuable knowledge, experience, and insights over time. This can be a gradual process or a sudden occurrence, and it can have significant negative impacts on an organisations performance, decision-making, and innovation.
The ‘long memory of communities’, as Andy described it in the discussion, is in much better shape than the ‘short memory of institutions’.
Unlike organisations with our shifting priorities and short-term goals, communities carry with them a deep-rooted understanding of their history, challenges, and aspirations. They will be acutely aware of the last time they were asked a view on a topic, never to hear what happened to it or see any meaningful change as a result.
As Rob says:
“So much of the engagement that takes place from organisations that work in local communities is often very one way. So, it’s not a conversation.“
To tap into this valuable knowledge, we need to shift our approach. Instead of imposing pre-determined agendas, we need to create space for open dialogue, allowing communities to lead the conversation and share their perspectives authentically.
This also requires moving away from overly corporate approaches. As Andy says:
“We need to be professionals in everything that we do but we don’t need to have the broom handle up the back of our jacket all the time.
I always illustrate it by the ‘lanyard effect’. I don’t think it’s my phrase, but we all know it. People come to a meeting and they feel that they haven’t got the agency to speak because they haven’t got the lanyard on. So, it’s about moving beyond those kind of things”.
Lanyards, and other symbols of authority, can indeed influence social dynamics. Seeing someone with a lanyard can subconsciously suggest they have a certain level of authority or expertise. This can make people less likely to question their actions or instructions.
Visual cues of authority can subtly shift power dynamics in interactions. People might be more inclined to defer to someone, even if that person doesn’t explicitly exert their authority.
Which of course is one of the reasons our organisations struggle with effective adult-adult conversations. Conversations require a willingness to share power, moving away from a top-down approach and embracing collaborative partnerships.
Power imbalances stifle conversations. Those with less power may withhold opinions fearing consequences, while those in power may dominate, leading to unequal participation. Information can be distorted through filtering or withholding, breeding mistrust. This can create resentment, hinder empathy, and suppress creativity.
If you’re in, for instance, a landlord and tenant relationship, there is an automatic power imbalance. If you’re unaware of it, it will hinder any attempts at building trust.
Everything Rob and Andy spoke about was really shifting from a transactional to relational focus:
Transactional:
- Short-term, with immediate gain.
- Communication is often scripted, standardised, and focused on efficiency.
- Limited relationship focus, impersonal, often ends when the transaction is complete.
Relational:
- Builds a long-term relationship based on trust and mutual benefit.
- Cultivates ongoing connection, loyalty, and partnership.
- Personalised communication, empathetic, focuses on understanding needs and building rapport.
- Ongoing relationship, nurtured over time, with a focus on shared value and understanding.
A conversation is generally the first step in initiating any relationship, whether it’s a friendship, romantic relationship, or professional connection.
You wouldn’t start with a survey, and yet we do. And we get the same results time after time.
Start a conversation, keep it going, align it to your purpose, create a better organisational memory.
Related: Innovation Pitfalls: Balancing Capability and Capacity