The Next Next Common Sense
asked and answered, problems solved, and connections formed. And proj- ect post-mortems, once ephemeral conversations, now become permanent digital artifacts accessible to future teams. These digital traces fundamentally transform how organizations re- member. Memory becomes less episodic and more continuous, less selec- tive and more comprehensive, less centralized and more distributed. The question shifts from “What do we remember?” to “How do we make sense of everything we’ve preserved?” This transformation creates both opportunities and challenges. Digital organizational memory can prevent the repetition of past mistakes, preserve crucial context that would otherwise be lost through personnel changes, and enable pattern recognition across longer time horizons than human memory typically encompasses. However, it can also create ac- countability anxieties that stifle creativity, preserve outdated approaches that should be discarded, and overwhelm current decision-making with excessive historical context. Organizations that effectively leverage digital traces as memory cre- ate what might be called “selective visibility”—approaches that make historical information appropriately available without creating paralyz- ing information overload. They develop archival strategies that preserve crucial context while allowing less significant details to fade. They create retrieval mechanisms that surface relevant historical information when needed rather than presenting all possible history simultaneously. And they establish appropriate forgetting practices that allow certain digital traces to expire when their retention creates more harm than benefit. Spotify exemplifies this balanced approach to organizational mem- ory. Their engineering teams maintain comprehensive documentation of system decisions through “architecture decision records” (ADRs) that preserve the context and reasoning behind technical choices. These digital traces ensure that future teams understand why systems were designed in particular ways rather than just inheriting unexplained technical deci- sions. However, they distinguish between different types of organizational
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