I had long term business relationship with a company, originating and developing a product for them.
From 50 - 1000 employees things worked very well. There was a great deal of continuity in the relationship. Lots of trust and flexibility in both directions. Our product quickly became the best available, by a long margin, and for a couple decades.
But after they passed about 1500 - 2000 employees they got more organized. A formalized organization and process system. Things quickly went downhill. As someone working from outside the company, their processes were incredibly disruptive and inefficient for me. Likewise, their turnover replaced a situation of working with long time friendly colleagues, who knew me very well, to working with people who had no idea what my positive reputation was, my track record of delivering quality without the hammer of conformance, etc.
The project's ambitious upward trajectory stalled. Even then it took about ten years to fall behind other players. But it never recovered. Today it operates deep in the shadows of others.
Virtually every employee I worked with was wonderful, inclined to be as supportive as restrictions allowed, etc. But the institutionalization smothered the organizations ability to operate with any flexibility, no matter how dysfunctional or value destroying the results.
The company became like someone who has permanently lost the ability to form new memories.
You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up.
Sorry to hear this. It's such a tricky thing for an org to balance, if not impossible.
One thing I notice is it's very easy to add additional layers of relatively small actual value that look like lots of value. So you might say you've earned a degree of respect by working consistently for years, and people don't mind that you don't always update your status reports. But then if you don't defend vigorously in the org, someone might come in who does very little work in terms of company output, but always gets your status reports in and reports up the chain so you "don't have to". And that looks like value to the person above, but it wasn't really. And now you have a new boss.
>You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up.
Was that an LLM reference or is it the myopia in me?
There's a parallel here, either way. All the documentation in the world will not make a person, or llm session interchangable.
In some sense the new way of coding feels like building a big org with people without memory. If you can document the process perfectly, there is a holy grail out there somewhere.
That company not only failed to "institutionalize" the specialized knowledge they had, once they became big enough for bureaucracy to self-assemble they ended up institutionalizing the concept of not valuing things that led to initial success.
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story of cars being specified to understand a 100kmh air speed on the rear windscreen. 'Ridiculous, it can't reverse at more than 30kmh said the car designers' and ignored the spec. The first time new cars were transported on a train, all the rear windscreens blew in.
A long time ago I worked on a software product to try to record design decisions in the creation of long-lived artefacts, such as nuclear reactors. The idea being that engineers looking to make a change 20+ years later (when the original engineers had retired) would understand why something had been designed the way it had.
The project was not a success, despite some initial enthusiasm from some commercial sponsors. I think this was due to 2 main issues:
a) The software infrastructure of the days wasn't really up to it. This was just before wikis, intranets etc, which would have made everything a lot easier.
b) The engineers working on the design had no incentive to record the rationale of their decisions. It was extra work with no benefit for them (any benefit was by someone else, years down the line). In fact it could make it more likely for them to be held liable for a bad decision. And, in an age of cheap outsourcing, it could reduce their job security.
The second problem was by far the more important and I don't know how you get around it.
You have to start thinking about product as the entire provenance chain, not just the end product. That means nobody gets paid for a working reactor. They only get paid for a working AND DOCUMENTED reactor.
Related, you have to make it benefit the current generation of engineers as well. Want to get your thing built? Deliver your designs in format X, which also happens to support long term reference.
None of this is easy… but it is actually possible to align incentives like this. You just have to do it from very high up, and with a very firm hand.
This is often made worse as a result of hiring outside consultants. Firstly they don't have the institutional knowledge you have when starting a project, but they also aren't incentivised to properly document and hand over their knowledge at the end since that means less future work.
This is why a lot of government projects take so long, they don't see the value in keeping an in-house team of trained experts (see the difference in train line contruction costs in the UK compared to Spain), until you realised how good they were but you can't hire them back.
That’s a great point. In my city, they started paving side streets with with in-house staff. They have dedicated funded budget, government can borrow cheaply, and they don’t need to price risk and margin.
Over 5 years, they spend 30-40% less depending on utilization of equipment. (We had a two slow years due to pandemic and weather)
For the work that’s funded by state aid or grants, they use contractors as its a variable workload.
I've heard this is part of why major infrastructure projects in America can be so expensive. A city builds one subway line, and everyone working on the project has no experience, so it takes a long time and is expensive. The expense convinces people to oppose any more projects, so the city doesn't build any public transit for a decade(s). By the time they're ready to build another line, all the experience has evaporated, so the new line takes a long time and is expensive. Repeat forever.
There's an example of this in railway electrification: if you scroll down to the graph in https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5801/cmselect/cmtran... it shows that the UK tends to do electrification as occasional big projects, whereas Germany has consistently done about the same mileage every year for decades, presumably with the same institutions maintaining their expertise and just moving on to the next bit of track. Their costs are a quarter of the UK's...
Not Just Bikes did a YouTube on Seoul South Korea that brought this point up. They’ve got costs down because they’re working on it continuously.
As a tech writer people have a lot of experience but they never turn it into institutional knowledge because it’s never written down.
Ay best it’s tribal knowledge passed by word of mouth.
I know some people refuse to document things because they are hoping for job security but that never happens. Or sometimes for revenge for getting rid of them. But many companies survive despite those efforts.
I'm not good at writing documentation, and you can't pay me enough to care about it, sorry. I've tried enough times, and nobody reads it, or it becomes out of date by the time anyone reads it, and I don't see the personal ROI. I'll write notes for future me, and put them somewhere others can read it, if you don't make that onerous. Otherwise, if you want documentation from me, you need to have someone else drag the information out of me and write it down. But, I've only rarely been in organizations that care enough about documentation to do that, so there you go.
There's always a lot of talk about how documentation is important, but there's never budget for a tech writer (well, you must have found some, as you've taken tech writer as a title, but it's not often available) or a documentation maintainer.
My day job is product developer and I have written hundreds of pages of documentation. The key is to write it as you go along. Not to wait until the release is ready to go!
There’s strategic bidding as well. Specifications cannot cover every conceivable occurrence over the course of a 4 year construction project, so contractors can structure their bid to be low upfront with big pick ups later for change orders when issues arise.
Only a if the government people in charge care and know. My friends in the federal contracting space are either starving or backing the truck up and looting the place.
Thank you for bringing this up. This is profoundly true for big projects (toll roads/transport) and small infra projects (e.g. community solar). The length of time that it takes to develop things like this, combined with the turnover and the sheer amount of context that single developer has to have to be successful with it, is one of the driving forces in why development is such a difficult/risky business.
It's one of the most consequential problems imaginable to solve, particularly as the US begins to realize that we need to compete with decades of China's subsidized energy and industrialization/manufacturing capacity.
Taking it a level deeper, what most don't realize is that infrastructure is an asset class: before someone funds the construction of $100M of solar technology, a developer will spend 2-5 years developing 15 or so major commercial agreements that enable a lender/financier to take comfort that when they deploy such a large amount of cash, they'll achieve a target yield over 20+ years. Orchestrating these negotiations (with multiple "adversaries") into a single, successfully bankable project is remarkably difficult and compared to the talent needed, very few have the slightest clue how to do this successfully.
Our bet at Phosphor is that this is actually solvable by combining natural language interfaces with really sophisticated version control and programming languages that read like english for financial models and legal agreements, which enables program verification. This is a really hard technical challenge because version control like Git really doesn't work: you need to be able to synchronize multiple lenses of change sets where each lens/branch is a dynamic document that gets negotiated. Dynamically composable change sets all the way down.
We are definitely solving this at Phosphor (phosphor.co) and we're actively hiring for whoever is interested in working at the intersection of HCI, program verification, natural language interfaces and distributed systems.
That makes sense. It seems like during the continuous "building up America" period of the late 40s through mid 70s there was no problem of getting shit done at reasonable cost, because of continuously available institutional knowledge.
Once large infrastructure projects become sporadic in nature, you begin to run into issues.
The solution has to be continuous stimulus, but that also runs into problems of corruption and capture by special interests (the longer the stimulus, the more incentive there is for 3rd parties to appropriate funds).
Somehow, other nations have managed to figure this out. Of the developed world, seemingly only Americans are resigned to the belief that such things are sadly impossible.
That's because we're richer and can object. The Europeans get bulldozed by their governments. It's why they're always protesting some online ID law or some "show your photo ID to browse Wikipedia" shit but no one listens to them.
It has far more to do with respect for private property due to the existence of a class of sophisticated, politically literate professionals capable of opposing development. Europe and Canada are similar; the extent to which this retards the economy is more obvious in Europe. It isn’t hard to build a road when you can just expropriate all the land and completely disregard environmental impacts.
Robert Moses did a lot of bad that we don't want to repeat. We have gone too far the other way but those big projects often did come at high cost - but the cost wasn't dollars
1. Institutional memory does seem important. It feels like lots of government things are bad at this – big infrastructure projects tend to come in occasional bursts which means each time they are learning from scratch; Japan moves lots of civil servants around every few years which means that no one really remembers how to do things.
2. I think there is a negative side of this too, a kind of ‘institutional trauma’ where some bad memory can cripple an institution. Eg one reason Microsoft lost so much to Google in the early Internet was the memory of the late ’90s antitrust action making them less aggressive. Other companies can have one particular close shave which then causes them to focus too much on avoiding a repeat, a situation you also see writ small in tech teams.
3. I think a bit about production incidents in tech too here. When things are small and the systems are relatively new and they break a lot, this may be ok for the business and recovery can hopefully be fast because it is possible to quickly hypothesise / fix stupid problems. When most silly bugs have been squashed and systems are big and reliable, problems can snowball faster, the business may be more sad about them happening, people can’t understand the whole picture well enough to have good ideas, and the lower base rate of incidents means people will be more stressed or otherwise unable to focus on the actual problem
There’s a balance to these things. I worked for a well run large government bureaucracy that was both confounding and frustrating and great at execution.
The organization executed the mission very well. They had solid process and controls. They knew why they had the controls. People were really smart and motivated.
The confounding part was that any change was impossible because there was an expectation of that level of rigor for new things. Literally took a year to approve using Google.
It seems that a lot of businesses barely function. They're often stuffed with overpaid executives while the actual business wheezes along, barely managing to get its product out the door. More attention is usually paid to reducing competition, increasing one's moat, and restricting supply, so customers have little choice, as in the aerospace industry from this article.
I suspect this is why it's good for the USA to be constantly at war. If you're only at war occasionally, you forget how to make war and can lose. If you're at war constantly, you'll remember how to do it.
> What happened next, you may not be surprised to hear, comes in different versions. The person who spotted that there might be a problem may have been a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary…
>> While they were away, a passing policeman noticed an extraordinary whirlpool in the normally placid canal. He also noticed that the water level was falling. He rushed off to find the dredging gang. By the time they all returned, the canal had disappeared. It was then that realisation dawned. Jack and his men had pulled out the plug of the canal. One-and-a-half miles of waterway had gone down the drain.
> It may have been three anglers who raised the alarm, and given that they have names — Howard Poucher, Graham Boon and Pete Moxon — maybe that version’s true. Another telling says it wasn’t until the evening that
>> local police contacted Stuart Robinson, the British Waterways section inspector.
Other relevant context: sections of UK canals being unintentional drained isn't particularly unusual, although the culprit is usually a paddle left open on a lock gate or a leaky culvert rather than a plug being pulled. Whether that inconveniences anyone for any length of time depends mostly on how full the reservoirs at the top end of the canal are...
Wouldn't have been that unusual in 1972 when nearly all the canals including that one had ceased commercial operations and many of them had been intentionally drained either. I suspect the transition from the canal being infrastructure maintained by locally-stationed full time professionals to a pleasure cruiseway which the new waterways board was willing to devote a bit of time to maintaining only after the previous one had spent several years trying to get it shut down probably had as much impact as the Blitz on the work crew having no idea about plugholes...
This is one of the biggest consequences of layoffs in corporations. There's this misconception that everything can and is "objectively" quantified, and thus layoffs targeting otherwise well-performing individuals are being done because this will quantifiably save the institution money and resources. Then something inevitably happens where someone they previously let go could've saved the cost of their employment and then some in damages, but the company is often too blind to realize this.
Thing is, I've seen this time and time again. A lot of us have, I suspect, seen this story repeatedly in our own current or prior organizations. Someone who worked for the company for a decade, or who had intricate knowledge of prior M&As, technology stacks, codebases, customers, and/or processes who was thrown out as a line on a spreadsheet.
I do my best to buck the trend in my work by documenting everything (the "bus problem", as I call it) I can and sharing it with my colleagues, but the continuous churn of M&As and software deprecation means that documentation is often discarded with old systems rather than reviewed and preserved, thus further erasing any lingering institutional memory.
To be fair, this issue isn't likely to kill a company outright on its own. Sure, it could lead to a serious problem and cost gobs of money, but it rarely kills a company or project outright in the process. Still, it's preventable harm just by keeping some additional persons around for knowledge or managing an organizational library of content. It's ultimately such a minor cost in the grand scheme of things that shareholders won't really care. $1m a year for a corporate library and a handful of staff to support it is peanuts on a multi-billion dollar enterprise balance sheet, and will almost certainly improve outcomes across the organization as a whole.
Or to put it far more simply: institutional memory is the fat on an animal. Cutting fat down to the bone leaves the animal weaker and vulnerable as a result, as it has no emergency stores of energy (or in this case, knowledge) to pull from and thus must cannibalize itself in times of crisis.
I call this "process arbitrage." Until the most recent CEO, Boeing was ruined by this. They have extremely well documented processes. So you can fire the people that understand the reasons behind those processes, and the ghost of their expertise lingers. For a while.
This starts out looking very attractive because you've cut costs and your profitability is up. Then it all suddenly goes to shit and your planes crash.
That story is very Chesterton Fence. If Chesterton was working in a canal instead of walking on a country path. There's a balance between preserving memory and maintaining and benefitting from that knowledge and choosing what not to remember.
When Kurt Cobain shot and killed himself in 1994, his widow went on TV to say that what he did was wrong. Cobain’s death then did not result in others’ killing themselves (known as the “Werther effect”). Robin William’s suicide 20 years later, however, did result in more deaths as the story spread widely.
But otherwise, I do agree that we should preserve institutional memory and that putting processes over people can lead to forgetting.
Perhaps tangentially related Re: “Chesterfield’s plug", Chesterton’s fence came to mind today while mulling over this sort of “forgetfulness” (which tends toward outright negligence) in my own circles.
For instance TSMC is discussed a lot on HN and every time I'm thinking that even TSMC itself probably couldn't produce their latest chips if they had to start from scratch tomorrow.
It can be documents and it can be people, but it's not essentially either one. It can take many forms, including being lost when none of those forms has it on offer, as every business is different. An institution with excellent documentation, mature processes, and adept hiring could retain its "memory" without a single human member remaining from the past. Oral history and other humanistic forms of memory make everyone feel warm and fuzzy, but they're not to be idealized as the only real memory simply because they were underappreciated for a some time.
Too much emphasis on documentation. It's people that matter.
If you build the sort of culture where people hang around, they will occasionally have time to tell each other the internal folklore. "When I started, an old guy told me about the plug under the canal".
People who work with software know this. Yeah, there are documents describing the system. No, reading them does not mean you understand the system.
Alas, it's an intangible, and doesn't get counted with the rest of the beans.
Apologies for bring in "AI" to a non-AI thread, but I really do think that things will be a game changer for institutional memory, both at recording it and recovering it. I don't personally use them but I have many coworkers that use AI tools to join meetings and get summaries/transcriptions aftward that they can read or query (also using AI). As people get more used to it, I would imagine that sort of thing becomes standard practice (regardless of whether or not it should, but that's a different topic)
From 50 - 1000 employees things worked very well. There was a great deal of continuity in the relationship. Lots of trust and flexibility in both directions. Our product quickly became the best available, by a long margin, and for a couple decades.
But after they passed about 1500 - 2000 employees they got more organized. A formalized organization and process system. Things quickly went downhill. As someone working from outside the company, their processes were incredibly disruptive and inefficient for me. Likewise, their turnover replaced a situation of working with long time friendly colleagues, who knew me very well, to working with people who had no idea what my positive reputation was, my track record of delivering quality without the hammer of conformance, etc.
The project's ambitious upward trajectory stalled. Even then it took about ten years to fall behind other players. But it never recovered. Today it operates deep in the shadows of others.
Virtually every employee I worked with was wonderful, inclined to be as supportive as restrictions allowed, etc. But the institutionalization smothered the organizations ability to operate with any flexibility, no matter how dysfunctional or value destroying the results.
The company became like someone who has permanently lost the ability to form new memories.
You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up.
One thing I notice is it's very easy to add additional layers of relatively small actual value that look like lots of value. So you might say you've earned a degree of respect by working consistently for years, and people don't mind that you don't always update your status reports. But then if you don't defend vigorously in the org, someone might come in who does very little work in terms of company output, but always gets your status reports in and reports up the chain so you "don't have to". And that looks like value to the person above, but it wasn't really. And now you have a new boss.
Was that an LLM reference or is it the myopia in me?
There's a parallel here, either way. All the documentation in the world will not make a person, or llm session interchangable.
In some sense the new way of coding feels like building a big org with people without memory. If you can document the process perfectly, there is a holy grail out there somewhere.
Or maybe there isn't.
A long time ago I worked on a software product to try to record design decisions in the creation of long-lived artefacts, such as nuclear reactors. The idea being that engineers looking to make a change 20+ years later (when the original engineers had retired) would understand why something had been designed the way it had.
The project was not a success, despite some initial enthusiasm from some commercial sponsors. I think this was due to 2 main issues:
a) The software infrastructure of the days wasn't really up to it. This was just before wikis, intranets etc, which would have made everything a lot easier.
b) The engineers working on the design had no incentive to record the rationale of their decisions. It was extra work with no benefit for them (any benefit was by someone else, years down the line). In fact it could make it more likely for them to be held liable for a bad decision. And, in an age of cheap outsourcing, it could reduce their job security.
The second problem was by far the more important and I don't know how you get around it.
Related, you have to make it benefit the current generation of engineers as well. Want to get your thing built? Deliver your designs in format X, which also happens to support long term reference.
None of this is easy… but it is actually possible to align incentives like this. You just have to do it from very high up, and with a very firm hand.
Unfortunately that is rather easy to game. Especially in an age of LLMs.
This is why a lot of government projects take so long, they don't see the value in keeping an in-house team of trained experts (see the difference in train line contruction costs in the UK compared to Spain), until you realised how good they were but you can't hire them back.
Over 5 years, they spend 30-40% less depending on utilization of equipment. (We had a two slow years due to pandemic and weather)
For the work that’s funded by state aid or grants, they use contractors as its a variable workload.
So whatever the Germans are doing with their rail, thank god the UK isn't.
As a tech writer people have a lot of experience but they never turn it into institutional knowledge because it’s never written down. Ay best it’s tribal knowledge passed by word of mouth.
I know some people refuse to document things because they are hoping for job security but that never happens. Or sometimes for revenge for getting rid of them. But many companies survive despite those efforts.
There's always a lot of talk about how documentation is important, but there's never budget for a tech writer (well, you must have found some, as you've taken tech writer as a title, but it's not often available) or a documentation maintainer.
It's one of the most consequential problems imaginable to solve, particularly as the US begins to realize that we need to compete with decades of China's subsidized energy and industrialization/manufacturing capacity.
Taking it a level deeper, what most don't realize is that infrastructure is an asset class: before someone funds the construction of $100M of solar technology, a developer will spend 2-5 years developing 15 or so major commercial agreements that enable a lender/financier to take comfort that when they deploy such a large amount of cash, they'll achieve a target yield over 20+ years. Orchestrating these negotiations (with multiple "adversaries") into a single, successfully bankable project is remarkably difficult and compared to the talent needed, very few have the slightest clue how to do this successfully.
Our bet at Phosphor is that this is actually solvable by combining natural language interfaces with really sophisticated version control and programming languages that read like english for financial models and legal agreements, which enables program verification. This is a really hard technical challenge because version control like Git really doesn't work: you need to be able to synchronize multiple lenses of change sets where each lens/branch is a dynamic document that gets negotiated. Dynamically composable change sets all the way down.
We are definitely solving this at Phosphor (phosphor.co) and we're actively hiring for whoever is interested in working at the intersection of HCI, program verification, natural language interfaces and distributed systems.
We just do subways and get good at it.
Once large infrastructure projects become sporadic in nature, you begin to run into issues.
The solution has to be continuous stimulus, but that also runs into problems of corruption and capture by special interests (the longer the stimulus, the more incentive there is for 3rd parties to appropriate funds).
All the old money already got a ton of wealth they didn't really deserve (conquest through Native american genocide)
1. Institutional memory does seem important. It feels like lots of government things are bad at this – big infrastructure projects tend to come in occasional bursts which means each time they are learning from scratch; Japan moves lots of civil servants around every few years which means that no one really remembers how to do things.
2. I think there is a negative side of this too, a kind of ‘institutional trauma’ where some bad memory can cripple an institution. Eg one reason Microsoft lost so much to Google in the early Internet was the memory of the late ’90s antitrust action making them less aggressive. Other companies can have one particular close shave which then causes them to focus too much on avoiding a repeat, a situation you also see writ small in tech teams.
3. I think a bit about production incidents in tech too here. When things are small and the systems are relatively new and they break a lot, this may be ok for the business and recovery can hopefully be fast because it is possible to quickly hypothesise / fix stupid problems. When most silly bugs have been squashed and systems are big and reliable, problems can snowball faster, the business may be more sad about them happening, people can’t understand the whole picture well enough to have good ideas, and the lower base rate of incidents means people will be more stressed or otherwise unable to focus on the actual problem
The organization executed the mission very well. They had solid process and controls. They knew why they had the controls. People were really smart and motivated.
The confounding part was that any change was impossible because there was an expectation of that level of rigor for new things. Literally took a year to approve using Google.
> What happened next, you may not be surprised to hear, comes in different versions. The person who spotted that there might be a problem may have been a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary…
>> While they were away, a passing policeman noticed an extraordinary whirlpool in the normally placid canal. He also noticed that the water level was falling. He rushed off to find the dredging gang. By the time they all returned, the canal had disappeared. It was then that realisation dawned. Jack and his men had pulled out the plug of the canal. One-and-a-half miles of waterway had gone down the drain.
> It may have been three anglers who raised the alarm, and given that they have names — Howard Poucher, Graham Boon and Pete Moxon — maybe that version’s true. Another telling says it wasn’t until the evening that
>> local police contacted Stuart Robinson, the British Waterways section inspector.
Wouldn't have been that unusual in 1972 when nearly all the canals including that one had ceased commercial operations and many of them had been intentionally drained either. I suspect the transition from the canal being infrastructure maintained by locally-stationed full time professionals to a pleasure cruiseway which the new waterways board was willing to devote a bit of time to maintaining only after the previous one had spent several years trying to get it shut down probably had as much impact as the Blitz on the work crew having no idea about plugholes...
Thing is, I've seen this time and time again. A lot of us have, I suspect, seen this story repeatedly in our own current or prior organizations. Someone who worked for the company for a decade, or who had intricate knowledge of prior M&As, technology stacks, codebases, customers, and/or processes who was thrown out as a line on a spreadsheet.
I do my best to buck the trend in my work by documenting everything (the "bus problem", as I call it) I can and sharing it with my colleagues, but the continuous churn of M&As and software deprecation means that documentation is often discarded with old systems rather than reviewed and preserved, thus further erasing any lingering institutional memory.
To be fair, this issue isn't likely to kill a company outright on its own. Sure, it could lead to a serious problem and cost gobs of money, but it rarely kills a company or project outright in the process. Still, it's preventable harm just by keeping some additional persons around for knowledge or managing an organizational library of content. It's ultimately such a minor cost in the grand scheme of things that shareholders won't really care. $1m a year for a corporate library and a handful of staff to support it is peanuts on a multi-billion dollar enterprise balance sheet, and will almost certainly improve outcomes across the organization as a whole.
Or to put it far more simply: institutional memory is the fat on an animal. Cutting fat down to the bone leaves the animal weaker and vulnerable as a result, as it has no emergency stores of energy (or in this case, knowledge) to pull from and thus must cannibalize itself in times of crisis.
This starts out looking very attractive because you've cut costs and your profitability is up. Then it all suddenly goes to shit and your planes crash.
When Kurt Cobain shot and killed himself in 1994, his widow went on TV to say that what he did was wrong. Cobain’s death then did not result in others’ killing themselves (known as the “Werther effect”). Robin William’s suicide 20 years later, however, did result in more deaths as the story spread widely.
But otherwise, I do agree that we should preserve institutional memory and that putting processes over people can lead to forgetting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Solid writing.
Institutional memory is not information or documents - it's people.
Every single real-world process has implicit knowledge. And you can't always capture that knowledge of paper.
But, many corporations seem to want to get rid of their most experienced people to save money and have better quarterly results for the stock market.
If you build the sort of culture where people hang around, they will occasionally have time to tell each other the internal folklore. "When I started, an old guy told me about the plug under the canal".
People who work with software know this. Yeah, there are documents describing the system. No, reading them does not mean you understand the system.
Alas, it's an intangible, and doesn't get counted with the rest of the beans.