Sewer Rats and Corporate Learning

If you ever have to kill a sewer rat, you can take advantage of a serious weakness of the varmints - they remember what they've experienced and use their memories to predict what will happen in new situations. "But wait," you cry, "how can memory and experience be a weakness? How can memory and experience make a rat vulnerable? Isn't experience a good thing?"

As it goes in the sewers, so it goes in the corporate world, with a high value placed on experience and corporate learning. An entire industry has sprung up around the areas of knowledge capture and learning management systems. Companies create Chief Knowledge Officers (CKO) and pursue Knowledge Management (KM) solutions. We strive to capture memory and experience in our companies, but we never really question memory and experience themselves? When does memory help us? Does experience ever hurt us?

We assume that memory is good, that past experience protects us, that our accumulated memories and experiences help us make better decisions in the future. However, the influential pshychiatrist W. Ross Ashby, in his classic paper Principles of the Self-Organizing System suggested that there is no faculty or ability that is universally good, universally beneficial. An ability is only good or bad in relation to the environment. And this takes us back to our sewer rats.

A normal sewer rat is very suspicious. It has learned, in the relatively consistent world of the sewer, not to trust strange new food sources. If you put a pile of appealing, but poisoned, food in the sewer, the rats will hesitantly eat only a tiny sample of it, not enough to kill them. Because their environment is generally stable, their memory serves them well and protects them from this new and dangerous situation. But their memory is not always helpful.

In Ashby's words, "If, however, wholesome food appears at some place for three days in succession, the sewer rat will learn, and on the fourth day will eat to repletion, and die. The rat without memory, however, is as suspicious on the fourth day as on the first, and lives. Thus, in this environment, memory is positively disadvantageous." So, if the sewer environment includes the pest-control practice known as pre-baiting, memory and experience will lead rats to their death. What does this suggest for business?

If your business is in a stable, predictable industry in a consistent, unchanging business environment, experience and memory are valuable assets. If what happened before is a good predictor of what will happen next, experience is valuable. If how we handled this before is still useful and relevant, we can use it to determine how we will handle this today. If, however, your business is in an emerging industry, operating in a fast-paced unpredictable environment, the value of experience lessens, and may even become harmful. This is a judgement we all have to make as we face decisions and predictions about the future, as we design strategies and tactics, and as we choose people for our teams.

There are several areas where there is tension between those who have knowledge, experience and memory and those who don't. Consider the following:

• Is seniority justification for higher pay? Those who've been around longer have seen situations that new hires have not. But, new hires have fresh outlooks unconstrained by the way things were done before. Which is more valuable to your organization given the situations you're facing today?
• Should you promote from within? Internal people know the history of what's gone before, of how we got to where we are; outside hires do not. Depending on what you're facing, is knowledge of this history valuable or harmful?
• Do you seek answers from within your industry? If you're in health care, do you look to other health care organizations for solutions, or do you seek new practices from the world's of customer service, food processing, and manufacturing?
• Do you need to improve? The way you do things today was developed in yesterday's environment to face yesterday's challenges. Is it appropriate for today's environment and tomorrow's challenges?
• Are your policies bloated by past experience? Every time an incident happens, we add some wording to our policies, yet we almost never take things away. It grows and festers until we have six pages just dealing with dress code including precise definitions of "spaghetti straps", "midriff" and a working definition of what constitutes "visible underwear".

So, as with the sewer rat, don't assume that capturing memory and experience is inherently good. If your world is stable and unchanging, it's wise and helpful to base your decision on "how we've always done things around here". However, if your environment is changing, if you're facing challenges unlike those of yesterday, you need some fresh solutions, some fresh voices, some inexperience.