‹ Culture 3.14 · What we ask ourselves
Question · Information
What should an organisational memory forget, and what should it keep?
A memory that keeps everything ends up retrieving expired decisions with the same authority as the ones still in force.
Why it matters
Accumulating is cheap and looks prudent. The cost appears later, when a policy repealed three years ago comes back in an answer because it matches the question lexically.
The problem is not one of storage but of currency: almost no document says when it stopped being true.
What we know so far
Marking currency as a first-class attribute — rather than as optional metadata — changes the system’s behaviour more than any adjustment to retrieval. Keeping the old version linked to the new one works better than deleting it, because a past decision explains many present ones.
The history of a process and the reference knowledge age at very different rates, and it is worth treating them separately.
What remains open
What should genuinely be forgotten is still open. There is personal information, there are drafts and conversations whose historical value does not offset the risk of their reappearing.
We also lack a reasonable way of expiring tacit knowledge, which never got written down anywhere.