CONCEPT
Organizational Forgetting
The inevitable complement to organizational learning — the decay of unpracticed routines that erases institutional knowledge invisibly, now accelerated by AI's elimination of the instructive experiences from which the most consequential learning emerged.
Organizations remember through practice. The knowledge an organization possesses is not stored in filing cabinets or knowledge management systems; it is distributed across routines — standard operating procedures, habitual responses, taken-for-granted ways of doing things that encode decades of accumulated learning. A routine is organizational memory made operational: the lesson learned from a previous failure, embedded in a process that prevents recurrence without anyone needing to remember the original failure. The knowledge is maintained only through exercise. A routine that is not practiced decays: practitioners retire, documentation becomes outdated, institutional memory fades. March and Barbara Levitt called this process organizational forgetting and recognized it as the inevitable complement to organizational learning. Every organization is simultaneously learning and forgetting, and no one decides what will be forgotten. AI accelerates forgetting with a precision that March's framework predicted but that his original models, calibrated to pre-AI timescales, could not have anticipated.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The acceleration operates through a specific