Stage 2: Capture the Evidence
This section does not address the processes around conventional archives or digital databases. They are dealt with in a raft of other texts and, generally, handled professionally, at least in their logistical contexts. Nor does it address the discipline known as benchmarking, which is also covered competently in other literature. It deals specifically with the widely unexploited processes alongside the capture mediums that address the overlooked component of efficient decision making and the disregarded effects of corporate amnesia. They are tacit knowledge and experience, the wider knowledge dispersal problems arising from the departure of important knowledge holders and the inherent short, selective, and defensive memories of nonmobile employees that—alongside conventional archival material—constitute institutional-specific organizational memory (OM). To verify their veracity as sensible processes, I have included independent endorsements of the various mediums.
For the capture medium suitable for short- and medium-term OM—Oral Debriefings—I usually advise that interviews should be undertaken around important projects and key decision makers. For an indication of how adept the collection of tacit knowledge needs to be, my own graphic description is the pea under the mattress and the pile of soft quilts on which the princess slept in the classic fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, by which I mean that its character is iceberg-like and difficult for individuals to articulate personally. To access it requires interviewing skills that strip away the many layers of bedcovers, effectively teasing out the erstwhile hidden and complex knowledge buried in the recesses of individuals’ and organizations’ skills and experiences. In the right hands, the tool is powerful and the medium is friendly. Like the tears that come from peeling a raw onion, tacit knowledge can pour out.
In practice, there are four types of oral debriefing. The biographical debriefing focuses on an individual’s life or career. Conducted at stages during or at the end of an individual’s career, it is usually directed at very senior officers, people with decisive effects on organizational development. Its educational value to the organization is important because it can provide industry- and organization-specific insights into such aspects as culture, values, and the way strategy would have altered over time alongside a changing marketplace. Separately, it also doubles as a motivator to successive generations.
The second type—the subject debriefing—concentrates on obtaining knowledge about a single event or topic, such as a product launch or new building development, where research may require interviews with several people to obtain complete coverage. Its application is valuable when project performance is often over budget or overdue. Importantly, debriefings should take place as soon after the event as possible while the experience is still fresh in the mind. Even better, it should take place before anyone can put a value judgement on the outcome, a strategy that automatically defuses any inherent defensiveness on the part of the individual decision makers. The technique can be further modified if the organization’s culture is considered excessively defensive. In this case, debriefings should take place while the experience is taking place. In effect, events can be assessed in real time as opposed to hindsight, not unlike the principle of the black box flight recorder that is installed in all modern aircraft; if something goes amiss, the real-time data that it stores within itself can be used to find out what went wrong. At a stroke it improves the qualitative character of the evidential input and the learning potential of the subsequent analysis.
Thirdly, there is the critical incident debriefing, which as it suggests, occurs when there is an unexpected event, usually something damaging. Such examples might include a product recall or an unfavorable item of publicity. In this event, debriefings should be carried out soon after the episode and include as many of the people involved as possible.
Finally, there is the exit debriefing, commonly known as the exit interview, which is ordinarily not an interview at all, rather the output of a formulaic, 20-questions means of trying to uncover reasons why employees leave. When done well in oral, nonquestionnaire format, however, the debriefing can center on the issues and decisions unique to the exiting individual’s job and can be especially instructive as a decision-making tool. With senior decision makers being the most common candidates, such debriefings are always conducted near the end of a person’s tenure. Although also related to subject interviews, they are often categorized separately because they may cover many topics.
To the unskilled, interview techniques have typically been those used by journalists, where interviewees are consciously focused on the present. To be really fruitful, the discipline needs to concentrate more intensely on the “pea” of Hans Christian Andersen’s princess’s shrewd mother if it is to be applied as a decision-making tool.
The choice of a skilled interviewer is essential, mainly because the spoken word is invariably a more efficient way of conveying the abstract and complex nature of elements like the nuances of corporate culture, management style, and the often-obscure issues surrounding decision making within groups. Whether the choice of individual is in-house or external, the person in charge of the debriefing needs to be commanding enough not to be intimidated by the interviewee and insightful enough to identify and pursue pertinent questions. The actual skill of oral debriefing is the art of asking relevant questions and when the answers are unclear or fudged, the asking of even more probing questions. In many respects, the questioner is the more important component for, when left to his or her own devices, the subject’s contribution is typically bland and lacking both incisiveness and rigor.
In addition to being a good questioner, the person in charge of the debriefing needs to be an even better listener, for a large part of the debriefing is in the asking of supplementary questions when the interviewee’s responses are unclear, imprecise, or evasive. Also, a well-prepared questioner will be aware of gaps and inconsistencies in the available source materials and will ask questions to clarify or, in some instances, confirm the record. Such responses might shed new light on an issue or serve as yardsticks to judge the accuracy of other information provided by the interviewee. It is here that most tacit knowledge resides.
The medium of oral debriefing as a knowledge-capture device is, in fact, not new; nor is its application as a learning tool. Oral debriefing’s first big cheerleader and practitioner was the American social commentator and writer Studs Terkel. Born in 1912, his fascination with the medium came soon after the tape recorder’s commercial exploitation, when he started interviewing a whole cross-section of American society to piece together a jigsaw puzzle of experiences. In one of his best-selling books, Terkel makes his own observation about collecting oral history, including its importance in the work environment.
Amnesia is much easier to come by. As technology has become more hyperactive, we, the people, have become more laid back; as the deposits in its memory banks have become more fat, the deposits in man’s memory bank have become more lean. Like [Harold] Pinter’s servant, the machine has assumed the responsibilities that were once the master’s. The latter has become the shell of a once thoughtful, though indolent, being. It is the Law of Diminishing Enlightenment at work. Oral history is an extremely rich source for exploring the past and present of organizations. The stories managers and workers tell about their organizations are useful diagnostic tools. (Terkel, 1984)
Terkel’s pioneering work was concurrent with the efforts of the U.S. academic Professor Allan Nivens who, after successfully persuading educationalists to introduce oral history as a tool for serious scholarship in the 1940s, founded the Oral History Collection at Columbia University. Since then, other universities, including Harvard, Princeton, and the University of California–Berkeley, have also developed extensive collections of oral history. In the early 1950s Nivens brought oral history to industry when he organized the interview of more than 400 people for a history of the Ford Motor Company. “In the hands of a skilled professional, oral history can bring management helpful information, perspective, and insight,” he says. “It can benefit managers coping with the pace of change in the modern economy and the short-lived nature of the corporate memory. Oral history can supply that memory and needed perspectives in making decisions.” Since then a handful of companies have supported similar programs, among them ARCO, Beckman Instruments, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilley, Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical, Monsanto, Proctor & Gamble, Rohm and Haas, and Standard Oil Company.
Since industry broadly continued to ignore oral history’s employment as a capture vehicle or even as a decision-making tool, the main thrust of the discipline then transferred to the U.S. military, where it was seen as an essential means of preserving the experiences of past battles and of imparting those experiences to younger soldiers. Since World War II oral history—also known as “after-action reviews”—has become an increasingly critical adjunct to the more traditional sources of historical documentation.
For example, the army decided to play a more significant role in telling its own story of World War II. A former journalist, Lieutenant Colonel (later Brigadier General) S.L.A. Marshall, was assigned to pioneer the army’s oral history effort, which subsequently involved several hundred soldier-historians. Moving freely about the battle lines to gather interviews, their collection process began either while units were still in action or up to 10 days or more after the action. A special collection of interviews provided a “view from the other side” (Everett, 1992) when captured German and Japanese general officers were debriefed in order to provide intelligence information on successful combat tactics as well as useful historical material.
Improved techniques were employed in the Korean War and, later, in the Vietnam War, as well as the United States’ military deployments to Grenada, Panama, Southwest Asia, and, more recently, Afghanistan and the Gulf. As a sign of the growing importance of oral history in the army, in 1970 Army Chief of Staff General William C. Westmoreland directed the U.S. Army War College and the U.S. Army Military History Institute to sponsor jointly what has become known as the Senior Officer Oral History Program. The program, designed to allow most retired officers to convey to younger officers the qualities and experiences that made their careers successful, has produced more than 100,000 transcribed pages. Adopted by the navy in 1969, there exists in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Oral History program alone more than 200 bound volumes, and interviews have been done to produce dozens more.
Expanding the range of army oral history activities, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers established an active biographical and subject interview program in 1977. This was extended in the early 1980s at most of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s centers and schools. Today, in each army major command (MACOM), interviews collect data for preparing monographs or to teach lessons learned to young soldiers. In 1986 the Department of the Army directed that those exit interviews—called End of Tour (EoT) interviews—also be conducted with departing school commandants as well as division, corps, and MACOM commanders, to make interviews available to incoming commanders so that they can better understand the issues faced by their predecessors. In the late 1980s the Center of Military History went even further by creating an Oral History Activity to coordinate issues concerning all of the army’s oral history programs.
The laudatory comments of Terkel and Nivens aside, the value of oral debriefing can be judged by the more recent comments of Jochen Kraske, head of the World Bank Group Historical Office, who admits that even though most company work processes are largely designed around documentation, much remains unrecorded. Decisions taken, especially those regarding policies, are not always reflected in the files:
The voluminous paper record may provide no more than bare facts, and even that record often reflects the desire to gloss over disagreements and serious questions, or the desire to sell or excuse. An additional vital source of information is the views and perceptions of those who participated in the decision-making processes. We can learn much about what happened and why by asking those involved when a loan was identified and appraised, a crucial policy decision taken, a particular contract awarded. (Kraske, Becker, Diamond, & Galambos, 1997)
An effective oral history program, he says,
can address the problem of this gap by recording, before time dilutes or erases them, the memories of executive directors, borrowers, managers and staff, who participate in key events and developments in the bank’s evolution. Catching and questioning key participants in important decisions before time takes its toll will do much to fill in the record. (Kraske et al., 1997)
The bank’s experience, he adds, is also of interest to policy makers, development practitioners, and academic communities in both developing and advanced countries, who look to it to throw light on what was done, and whether it worked, thus helping—they hope—to avoid the errors of the past. With the passage of time, and as older staff retire, there has been a loss of institutional memory. It is easy today to be unaware of what happened yesterday on important issues. Staff often learn of the past, if they learn it at all, accidentally or incidentally, in a fragmentized fashion. Without the history, new staff in particular may be missing an important component of institutional culture —of understanding what the bank is and how it got there (Kraske).
For the other capture medium, Corporate Histories—the source of long-term OM—my usual recommendation is that they should be updated every 5 years. And for organizations that are uncomfortable about wider exposure of their histories, I advise that the documentation be kept private, even unpublished.
The biggest hurdle is for organizations to be nursed away from hagiography and toward a serious document of record that can be constructively used as a development tool for staff and managers in particular. This requires a format that gives the document authoritative content, which invariably requires a suitably qualified author with good editorial backup from the start. I usually counsel that projects be managed independently using an academic or professional researcher and a professional writer, the former to contribute rigor and credence to the project and the latter to add the necessary element of readability. To bestow independence and credibility, it is important for the author to be allowed to retain his or her copyright.
A good project manager should be able to bring to the project a number of distinctive skills not usually available if done in-house:
Advise on the best editorial structure and build this into a working set of objectives
Headhunt a suitable author and researcher
Construct the contractual arrangements between the author/researcher and the project manager/publisher and the subject company and the project manager/publisher
Manage on a day-to-day basis the author, researcher, and subject company to ensure momentum is maintained and deadlines achieved and provide monthly reports to the subject company
Edit the manuscript
Broker any changes that need to be made to the manuscript
Publish according to the subject company’s requirements
Market, sell, and distribute the book (if the subject organization wants to externalize the manuscript)
With the author and subject company distanced from the subject organization, the resultant manuscript/book should ensure that a subject company’s long-term memory has the necessary authority for powerful applications beyond public relations.
At the academic level, good corporate/management history gets the support of luminaries such as Sir Arthur Knight, an early chairman of the textile company Courtaulds and a key figure behind the creation of the Manchester Business School in the 1960s, when he arranged the commissioning of the history of the international textiles company in the late 1960s. Corporate history, he believed, was as important to the education and training of businessmen as was the study of political history to future statesmen or military history to future generals (Business History Newsletter, 1984). Elsewhere, the late Sir Peter Parker, a former chairman of British Rail, said “Business history is a missing dimension throughout the educational system. We need to build back into the business school approach the significance of a historical perspective” (Parker, 1986), while at the political level, Alex Fletcher, a former secretary of state for corporate and consumer affairs in Margaret Thatcher’s government, said in 1988:
There is a great deal of material in our schools and elsewhere about how babies are born but there is a tremendous shortage of publications about how businesses are born. Only a tiny number of people know there really was a Mr Barclay, a Mr Beecham, a Mr Cadbury, a Mr Rolls and a Mr Royce, and the marvellous [sic] stories of how they created these now world-famous companies. Generations can only understand these examples if they learn and understand the process, innovation and the leadership that made it possible. (Fletcher, 1988)
In spite of these endorsements, it is instructive that few business schools use all-embracing corporate or management chronicles in their curricula. One reason is the dearth of suitable accounts, leaving the responsibility for their production and application to institutions themselves. If business schools cannot or will not use corporate/management history in their curricula, they should at least teach how; if institutions make them available to employees, they can be applied as a decision-making tool.