Why storing data isn’t the same as retaining knowledge.
There’s a strange phenomenon happening inside organisations — and it has nothing to do with servers, software, or storage. In fact, most companies are drowning in information. What they’re missing is memory.
Not the kind that lives in archives or shared drives, but the kind that lives in people: the stories, patterns, context and hard-won lessons that help a business remember how to be smart.
Call it digital amnesia — a condition where organisations continually reinvent the wheel, repeat past mistakes, and lose the knowledge they already possess simply because no one can find it, no one thinks to ask for it, or no one feels safe enough to share it. And the cost is enormous.
The paradox of knowing everything and remembering nothing
Today’s organisations have more tools, platforms, dashboards and repositories than ever before. Yet Weick’s ‘concept of equivocality’ feels more alive than ever: people receive more data than they can meaningfully interpret.
Teams will therefore default to the fastest path:
If I can’t find it, I’ll redo it. If I don’t know who knows it, I’ll guess. If I’m not sure it exists, I’ll reinvent it.
Digital amnesia thrives in this gap between information abundance and understanding scarcity.
It shows up as:
Strategy decks rewritten every six months because no one trusts the last one.
So called “new initiatives” that look suspiciously like the pilot project from 2018.
Painful post-mortems that uncover the same failure modes as the year before.
Leaders are often surprised by issues their predecessors had already captured clearly.
All the signals of a business forgetting itself.
Why organisations forget
Most companies don’t lose knowledge — they smother it. Here’s how:
- Communication that archives rather than circulates
Email threads die. Slack messages evaporate. SharePoint folders multiply like rabbits.
Information is “stored” — but rarely shared in a way that becomes usable wisdom. Without narrative, context, and interpretation, knowledge becomes inert.
- Leadership blind spots
Many leadership teams assume they already have visibility of what the organisation knows. But information doesn’t automatically move upward — especially in cultures where speaking up feels risky, unrewarded or simply not worth the effort.
If leaders don’t actively create pathways for truth-telling, insights stay trapped in teams until they fade away.
- The cult of novelty
Businesses reward newness. New ideas. New frameworks. New strategic narratives.
So employees quickly learn: the past doesn’t matter unless it can be repackaged as innovation. Ironically, this leads to repetition disguised as reinvention.
- Over-reliance on tools without the behaviours to match
Knowledge-management tools are often treated as a quick fix, but software doesn’t create organisational memory — people do.
When teams don’t trust the system, don’t see the value, or simply don’t have time to contribute, the platform ends up as just another neglected repository — a digital attic everyone avoids.
- Attrition and turnover
When experienced people leave, they don’t just take data with them, context leaves with them too.
Unless that knowledge has been intentionally codified and shared, the organisation resets to zero… sometimes without noticing for months.
The real cost of digital amnesia
Digital amnesia taxes an organisation in three ways:
- Operational costs
Duplicated work, repeated analysis, and unnecessary rework drain hours, budgets, and focus. McKinsey once estimated knowledge workers spend roughly 20% of their time tracking down internal information. That’s a full day a week spent searching for things that already exist.
- Strategic costs
A company that can’t remember what it learned last year can’t make better decisions this year. The organisation stagnates, constantly firefighting symptoms instead of addressing root causes.
- Cultural costs
When knowledge doesn’t flow, people retreat into silos. They become territorial about information because scarcity makes it valuable. Psychological safety erodes. Collaboration becomes fragile.
In short: forgetting makes people defensive.
Why this is really a communication problem
Digital amnesia is often framed as a technology issue, but at its core, it’s a communications issue:
What are the core messages the organisation regularly repeats about itself — its purpose, priorities and identity?
Where is the background information that makes decisions, priorities and actions make sense (context) — and who actually has access to it?
How do teams collectively interpret what’s happening — and create a shared understanding of problems, priorities and next steps?
Who sees it as their job to preserve and pass on what the organisation has learned — and is anyone actually doing it?
When organisations stop communicating with clarity and curiosity, they stop remembering.
Without shared meaning, knowledge has nowhere to land.
Moving from digital amnesia to organisational memory
You don’t fix digital amnesia with another platform. You fix it by building behaviours and structures that keep knowledge alive:
- Make sensemaking a routine, not an emergency
Borrow a principle from Weick: meaning isn’t discovered; it’s constructed.
- Codify lessons as stories, not files
People don’t remember PDFs. They remember narratives, patterns, metaphors, and mistakes.
Turn your “knowledge base” into something human.
- Create psychologically safe channels for truth
If people fear criticism, they don’t share failures — and failures hold the richest knowledge.
Leaders must invite candour early and often.
- Give people visibility of who knows what
Most knowledge bottlenecks aren’t about documents; they’re about humans.
Expertise maps, cross-team retrospectives, and rotational projects help make tacit knowledge visible.
- Reward contribution, not just consumption
Organisational memory grows when people feel proud of adding to it — not burdened by it.
Digital amnesia is expensive, exhausting, and entirely avoidable.
When organisations build strong communication cultures — ones that value clarity, storytelling, shared context, and safe knowledge flows — they stop repeating what’s already been done and start building on it.