Glory Days: When Organisational Memory Becomes a Trap
One of my favourite Bruce Springsteen songs is Glory Days. He sings about bumping into an old school friend in a bar. They have a drink and a catch up. But all his old friend wants to talk about is his time at school. Back then he was captain of the football team. The local hero. The one everyone admired. Those were his glory days.
Later in the song, Springsteen meets a woman who was once the girl every boy wanted to date and every girl wanted to be. He asks what she has been doing with her life. But she too wants to talk about the past. About being young, carefree and admired. Her glory days.
The song is funny, affectionate and slightly sad. The people in it are not really talking about the past. They are clinging to it.
Some organisations are like this.
They are forever telling stories about past successes. The great turnaround. The industry award. The market-leading product. The visionary founder. Every conference, every leadership event and every induction programme contains another retelling of the same stories.
The problem is not that organisations remember. The problem is that they cannot stop remembering.
The most dangerous thing in your organisation may be its proudest achievement.
Organisations do not just store information. They store emotions.
The official memory sits in reports, presentations and archives. The emotional memory lives somewhere else. It lives in stories, traditions and conversations. It lives in the way people talk about “the way we do things around here.”
The official memory records what happened. The emotional memory records how people felt about what happened. When the two conflict, emotional memory usually wins.
Most organisational change programmes focus on the official memory. The real challenge lies in changing the emotional memory.
People may not remember the details of a successful transformation programme twenty years ago. They remember the pride. They remember feeling part of something important.
Likewise, they may not remember exactly why a merger failed or a major project collapsed. They remember the embarrassment, anger or sense of betrayal.
The emotional memory survives long after the factual memory has faded.
The most dangerous thing in your organisation may be its proudest achievement because success does not just create confidence. It creates attachment.
The organisation becomes emotionally invested in the methods, structures and assumptions that made it successful in the first place. Every proposal for change can then feel like a criticism of the past.
The people who delivered yesterday’s success are often sitting in today’s meeting.
When they hear, “We need to do things differently,” they may hear, “Everything you achieved no longer matters.”
That was never the intention. But it is often the emotional impact.
The conflict is not between remembering and forgetting. It is between pride and adaptation.
Every organisation says it values change. Most also celebrate loyalty. The trouble starts when change requires abandoning the very things loyal people helped to build.
The argument for change is usually presented as rational. The resistance is often emotional.
Organisations rarely become prisoners of failure. They become prisoners of success.
Middle managers see this more clearly than most.
Senior leaders talk enthusiastically about transformation. Long-serving staff talk passionately about preserving what made the organisation successful. Both positions sound reasonable.
The middle manager sits in the middle trying to make sense of the contradiction.
One meeting focuses on innovation. The next celebrates tradition.
One presentation explains why the future must be different. The next reminds everyone why the past was so successful.
Middle managers are often expected to honour the past and deliver the future at the same time.
Middle managers often discover that resistance to change is rarely resistance to change itself. It is resistance to what the change appears to say about the past.
The challenge is not choosing between the two. The challenge is living with both.
Organisations also develop selective memories.
Successes are remembered in vivid detail. Failures become blurred around the edges. Heroes grow larger with every retelling. Difficult decisions become simpler. Complex events become neat stories with obvious lessons.
The organisation still talks about the product that transformed the business fifteen years ago. The market has moved on. Customers have moved on. Competitors have moved on. Only the organisation remains emotionally attached.
Every strategy meeting begins with a story about past success. Eventually the story stops inspiring and starts restricting.
The result is often an organisation that remembers itself not as it was but as it wishes it had been.
An organisation can spend years celebrating its reputation for innovation while quietly becoming risk averse. An organisation that prides itself on being customer-focused may stop listening to customers. An organisation that sees itself as a great employer may struggle to hear what employees are actually saying.
The gap between identity and reality grows wider. The stories remain the same.
The healthiest organisations do not reject their history. Nor do they become trapped by it.
They understand that yesterday’s achievements deserve respect, not obedience.
Every organisation needs a memory. Without one it loses its identity. But when organisational memory becomes an emotional force, the past can start competing with the future.
The real question for senior leaders is this. Are people talking about the organisation’s glory days because they are proud of the past, or because deep down they no longer expect tomorrow to be better than yesterday?
blairmcpherson.co.uk
