Experience that lives in heads is a Liability
The Future Belongs To Organisations That Can Remember
In the last article I posited that experience matters more than ever, judgement built through real world exposure to real world consequences.
There’s a second thought that naturally falls out of that idea, and it’s surely an uncomfortable one for many businesses:
If experience only lives in people’s heads, your organisation doesn’t actually own its best information processes and worse it makes it hard to analyse and improve processes.
You’re borrowing experience.
And one or a cascade of resignations, a retirement of a 30 year workhorse, a business restructure, can be enough to lose it and set the business back weeks or years.
I’ve seen this play out repeatedly over my career and the damage is usually rarely obvious until it’s already too late.
The Hidden Fragility Most Businesses Ignore
The real operational competence (read actually getting the work done) lives elsewhere.
Not:
In procedures.
In policies.
In systems.
A compliance status tick.
It lives in:
That 30 year operator who “just knows when something isn’t right”.
The supervisor who just quietly fixes problems before they escalate.
The veteran who has seen the same failure play out three different ways.
Almost none of that knowledge is written down in a usable form.
Not because people are selfish, but because:
It’s hard to articulate.
It’s usually highly context dependent.
It doesn’t fit neatly into a procedure.
Information and knowledge is power offering some measure of protection to those who hold it.
Businesses quietly drift into a dangerous state:
Operational knowledge is concentrated, undocumented, and irreplaceable (or replaceable at great cost).
That’s not resilience.
That’s a fragile state.
Why “Lessons Learned” Never Worked
At some point, someone might say:
“We already do lessons learned.”
In theory, yes.
In practice, almost never.
Here’s why lessons learned fail:
They’re written after the fact, when people are tired and defensive.
They’re sanitised for politics and optics. For real.
They focus on outcomes but without deep diving the thinking, the why.
They get posted and communicated (hopefully), filed and then forgotten.
I once suggested running proper project close out sessions as part of learning lessons from each project in a previous role. I could see this massive chasm of information system disconnects and leakage across projects.
There was ample value in standardisation of processes, in seeking the experience of seasoned personnel where it mattered, namely, to execute work properly to a high standard, with minimal surprises and no rework.
Those meetings never happened.
Projects finished.
Everyone moved on to the next. Too busy.
Nothing was captured. Not valuable enough.
And the same mistakes quietly reappeared on the next job, and again on the next one.
Bad management? Or just organisational amnesia.
A Real Example: When Experience Fails to Stick
I’ve seen the cost of this first hand.
On one project, an inspection process wasn’t properly defined. There was ambiguity around who checked what, when, and how findings were verified. The process relied heavily on individual judgement, with no formal structure and no counter sign or secondary check to spread risk and accountability.
The result was entirely predictable.
Measurement errors eventually slipped through.
They weren’t picked up early enough because there was no real way to cross check.
Rework followed.
By the time it surfaced, the cost was mid five figures, a significant administrative burden to unwind and correct it for both the business and the client.
What stood out wasn’t just the failure, it was how simple it should have been to prevent the error to start with.
The process needed:
A clear structure.
Defined decision points.
A formal countersign to remove single-person dependency, people can and do make mistakes.
In other words, it needed a Schema or a checklist process implemented, to ensure information and data was sufficient and accurate. It was critical to project success.
I raised exactly this point. I suggested the issue be properly captured at project closeout so the next project stage didn’t repeat the same mistake.
Nothing happened.
No structured close-out.
No formal memory captured (no incident report or NCR).
No change identified, assessed, embedded.
An event and its outcome a few people knew about and committed to memory.
A couple of project stages later, a remarkably similar issue occurred again.
Different people.
Same weaknesses.
Same underlying assumption that “this will be caught.”
It becomes clear this isn’t a people problem.
It’s a memory problem.
Organisations Don’t Remember, People Do
People remember experiences naturally:
What we expected.
What surprised us.
Where things went wrong.
What we changed on the fly.
What we’d never do that way again and why.
Organisations, on the other hand, mostly remember:
Dates.
Deliverables.
Documents.
It’s storage.
For an organisation to actually remember and make use of learnings later, it needs a way to capture experience in a form that can be:
Recalled later.
Compared across time.
Used to inform decisions.
This requires structure.
Why Structure (Schema) Matters More Than Tools
A schema (in this context) is simply an agreed structure for capturing experience so it can be understood and reused later.
Without structure:
You get stories.
Anecdotes.
Opinions.
Noise.
With structure:
You get context.
Experiences become comparable.
Patterns emerge.
Learning compounds.
A schema doesn’t limit what people say.
It ensures what they say can be remembered.
Historically, schemas meant forms, and forms killed honesty.
Today, AI changes that massively.
People can speak naturally which can remove alot of friction.
Structure can be organised and Schema applied after the fact.
That’s the breakthrough.
The Practical Shift: From Reports to Conversations
The most effective way to capture real experience is not through writing.
It’s through guided conversations.
Short.
Audio-based.
Focused on actual reality, not compliance theatre.
Think in terms of three consistent entry points:
Project / Job Closeouts.
Veteran feedback sessions.
Incident and near-miss reality checks.
Each one is a short, structured conversation but not a report.
Veteran Feedback Sessions (The Missing Process)
This is where I believe most businesses are sitting on enormous, untapped value.
The simplest way to think about a veteran feedback session is this:
It’s a mission log designed to create memory echoes.
Not documentation.
Not a performance review.
A memory echo is a fragment of experience that resurfaces later, when similar conditions arise, offering context rather than necessitating instructions.
A veteran feedback session captures these echoes deliberately (as in you actually schedule them), before they fade or walk out the door.
The session itself is respectful and focused, aimed at how work really unfolds rather than how it’s described on paper. The questions are deliberately practical:
What do new people usually miss?
Where does the written version of the task processes break down?
What’s missing from the process and what are the variations in work that can happen in different scenarios.
What decisions do you make that aren’t written anywhere?
What only happens rarely, but really matters? The true edge cases.
What would you warn your replacement about?
These are not questions procedures can answer, but experienced people can.
No judgement.
No fixing.
No workplace politics.
Just an actual honest record of operational reality, captured so the organisation can recall it when it matters.
Captured properly, this knowledge:
Reduces key person risk.
Improves planning realism.
Can help reduce risk both business and safety.
Preserves judgement without burning people out.
It doesn’t make veterans replaceable.
It makes their experience permanent.
What This Looks Like in Practice (Not Theory)
This framework only matters if it changes real decisions. Here’s where it does.
Tendering
Instead of writing tenders from optimism and templates, tendering teams can actually ask:
Have we done something like this before?
Where did we underquote last time?
Which assumptions failed in similar jobs?
Which subcontractors caused friction under these conditions?
Memory echoes surface past cost overruns, sequencing issues across tasks, access constraints, mobilisation, accommodation, interface problems, before the price is locked in.
Schema helps AI organise the data and information so it can be properly applied to the new context being tendered for.
That alone can be the difference between a profitable job, a painful one or even declining one.
Planning & Scheduling
During planning, memory echoes expose:
Steps that always take longer than planned.
Interfaces where work regularly clashes and delays are likely.
Controls that look fine on paper but fail in practice or needed to be adapted to suit different client requirements.
Plans become more conservative where they need to be, and more confident where they can be.
More realistic. Better executed. Improved visibility.
Operational Decisions
When something feels “off” on a live job, managers can ask:
Have we seen this pattern before?
What usually happened next?
What decision helped last time?
Instead of relying on whoever happens to remember, the organisation remembers and can be asked.
Why This Is Different From Copilot-Style Add-Ons
At this point, someone might say:
“Isn’t this what Copilot does?”
No, and the distinction matters.
Tools like Microsoft Copilot are excellent at:
Summarising documents from libraries.
Drafting text.
Searching existing files.
They work with what’s already written.
This framework works for what was never written down before.
Copilot-style tools:
Sit on top of documents.
Optimise information flow.
Organisational memory systems:
Capture experience at the source.
Encode judgement, context, and reality through Schemas.
One improves productivity.
The other improves decision quality over time.
They’re complementary, but not interchangeable.
From Memory to Intelligence
Once experience is captured consistently, something powerful happens.
The organisation gains recall.
Now it’s possible to ask:
Have we seen this before?
What usually goes wrong at this stage?
Who did we use last time?
Where did our assumptions fail previously?
What are we not seeing?
This is where organisational memory begins to resemble an active operational intelligence layer.
The quiet assistant that:
Remembers your organisation’s past.
Surfaces relevant experience.
Highlights recurring risks.
Offers context, and visibility of foreseeable risks, not commands.
No AI hype.
Just institutional memory made usable.
The Gap Analysis Nobody Does (But Should)
One of the most valuable by products of this framework is gap analysis.
You can finally compare:
Work as imagined (procedures, plans, tenders).
Work as done (captured experience).
This exposes:
Controls that exist only on paper.
Training that doesn’t reflect reality.
Risks that appear late, every time.
Judgement calls that should be formalised as decision hold points.
You stop guessing where the gaps are.
You can finally see them.
This Is A Framework, Not A Platform
This idea sounds big because people assume it requires software.
It doesn’t.
At its core, it’s a management framework:
Capture experience through guided conversations.
Apply a consistent structure schema.
Store it as organisational memory.
Recall it during planning, tendering and project execution.
Feedback for improvement.
AI makes it easier and more scalable, but the thinking comes first and the Schema is the key.
That’s important, because it means this is usable now.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
We’re entering a period where:
Complexity is increasing.
Assumptions break faster than before.
In that environment:
Experience matters.
But only if it survives the people who hold it.
The future doesn’t belong to the youngest worker or the most experienced one.
It belongs to the organisations that stop letting experience vanish in people’s heads, and start turning it into institutional memory where the real value edge lies.
