Michael Lissack
contributions like facilitation, documentation, and team health mainte- nance alongside more traditionally recognized technical achievements. This expanded recognition framework helps create more equitable acknowledg- ment across different types of organizational contributions.
Ethical Forgetting
While much discussion of digital recognition focuses on what gets remembered and acknowledged, equally important ethical questions emerge around what should be forgotten. Digital systems create unprece- dented capacity for maintaining permanent records of mistakes, outdated approaches, and actions taken in different contexts—potentially creating what privacy scholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger calls “perfect memory” that prevents appropriate evolution. Organizations navigating this challenge thoughtfully develop what might be called “ethical forgetting practices”—approaches that allow certain digital traces to expire when their retention creates more harm than benefit. They distinguish between valuable organizational memory that should be preserved and digital traces that inappropriately constrain future possibility. And they create “fresh start” opportunities that allow people to evolve beyond past struggles rather than remaining permanently defined by them. Google’s work on the “right to be forgotten” in search results, while focused on public rather than organizational contexts, exemplifies the eth- ical balancing required. Their approach attempts to distinguish between information with ongoing public interest and information that primarily serves to perpetuate outdated associations—a distinction equally relevant to internal organizational recognition systems. Implementation: Creating Balanced Signpost Systems Implementing effective digital signpost and recognition systems requires thoughtful attention to organizational context, technological
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