50 first dates: therapies for Alzheimer's disease in the company

There are sick companies that forget what they know and don't even realise it. They suffer from business Alzheimer's. Fortunately, there are therapies for this pathology.

The problem of Alzheimer's in business

"50 first dates" is the title of a love film, which deals with the recurring theme of the recurring day that is lived over and over again, as if it were the curse of Groundhog Day, but with the memory loss of Memento.

And as always in our blog, there is someone in real life who has awakened the need for the text: Again a client, this time worried because in his company there must be somewhere information about many projects carried out for more than ten years, but he doesn't know where everything is. Of course, everything is in computer format but distributed here and there in such a way that it is impossible to find it and make use of it.

To paraphrase Socrates: I only know that we know a lot, but I don't know what, or where.

Working on a problem as if it were the first time, as a challenge, can be attractive from a personal point of view. But the bottom line of our organisation doesn't like it.

If we are a consultant in a multinational, faced with preparing a bid for a mining company in Chile, we would want to know what the organisation knows about it. Who has done such a project - perhaps a colleague in Sydney, years ago, someone who is not even with the company anymore, and where is the documentation - on a computer in the Hong Kong office where he or she used to work?
Normally this consultant will email a few colleagues, see if he or she can find a reference. In the end, he will most likely start the work from scratch.

Let's not go that far... Maybe I am a technician in a food products factory in Alicante, with a history of dozens of years of conscientious work in the analysis and development of technological solutions. However, I have only been with the company for a year. I am going to tackle a packaging improvement, but I don't even know if anyone has attended a course or a congress on technological improvements in packaging, nor where this documentation can be found. I could ask the old man on site, but he left the company six months ago.

These are real cases of companies with organisational Alzheimer's disease.

They are organisations condemned to forget what they know. And when they don't forget that they know, they find it so hard to find the information that the effort is rarely made. As we said above, we can work as if it were the first time, without relying on the effort already invested, but this affects the most important line in these times: the Anglo-Saxon bottom line, the profit and loss account. Not to say that the results may not be any better than the first time.

Knowledge Management Solutions for the enterprise to create value from knowledge

But we are in luck. There is a line of medicines to combat organisational Alzheimer's: Information technology applied to knowledge management.

As in any self-respecting medical therapy, for organisational Alzheimer's we have two complementary strategies: preventive and curative.

A curative therapy focuses on reversing the effects of the disease: in this case, forgetfulness. To do this, we will take a single pill of internal Competitive Intelligence. It is about releasing a piece of software within our organisation that finds, indexes and classifies all our information wherever it is and according to the topics that interest us. This piece of software, like Antara Mussol, will be trained in our business. So, when we want to find something that can help our new packaging project, the system will be on the lookout for concepts like "active packaging" or "packaging-product interaction". And it will find a PowerPoint on that topic that someone brought back from a course somewhere.

We see that the curative therapy of organisational Alzheimer's hardly affects the normal life of the company, and the patient can go about his business without much concern, as long as he takes the pill.

However, complementary preventive therapy does require continuous effort. On the other hand, it will bring us more benefits. It is a gene therapy that will change the way our organisation works. Because the pill that cures organisational Alzheimer's allows us to remember what we know, but not why we know it. That is, we can find a reference to the technology of "product-packaging interaction", but it will not tell us why we have that information, who worked on it, or what was the outcome of the project - if any - in that field. Nor, of course, why such a project was launched.

In order to know all this - and to make use of it, which is what it is all about - we need to change the way ideas and the projects that derive from them are managed in our organisation. It is a more profound change, affecting habitual behaviour, just as the prevention of certain diseases requires a certain discipline in day-to-day life.

Ideas are what move the world and business, and are a major asset of our organisation. As such an asset, we must manage them as well as possible. To do so, we will use an Idea Management System that will allow us to automatically generate a knowledge base during the reflection and discussion of the projects. In this way, we will effortlessly save the entire decision-making process, with the information associated with it, to be reused in the future.

Above all, we must never delete information. Not even the filtered or discarded ideas and associated information we have collected. What is disposable today, tomorrow who knows if it will be a useful line of work: our strategy may change, or technology may turn upside down. So let's not throw away what costs nothing to keep.

We should therefore simultaneously apply both therapies against organisational Alzheimer's: the curative one with internal Competitive Intelligence, and the preventive one with Idea Management.

This is not the time to waste assets, starting over and over again like the first day, but to evolve and progress in our business by managing what we are learning.

"50 first dates" is a film by Peter Segal.

Credits: Photo by Nathália Rosa on Unsplash

Antara undertakes that the content published is created by its own team, clients or collaborators. Antara never outsources the generation of content.
The opinions of the authors reflect their own views and not those of the company.