> "After the acquisition, half the people who knew why we had certain customer commitments were gone — we had to relearn what we owed to whom." ^pain A collective survivability pain. Mergers, reorgs, and system migrations break informal networks and decommission legacy repositories. Teams later repeat failed strategies because the original post-mortem was never preserved, or attempts to honour commitments fail because the context behind them left. ## Discovery questions - "After your last reorg, what knowledge took the longest to re-establish?" - "If you acquired (or were acquired by) another company, how would you absorb their know-how versus just inherit their docs?" ^discovery-questions ## Examples - HP-Autonomy: analyses note that rapid leadership turnover and culture clash destroyed institutional memory about Autonomy's products and accounting practices.[^1] - AOL-Time Warner: documented as a case where incompatible cultures and reorganisations led to knowledge silos and loss of institutional memory about core media businesses.[^2] - BMJ study of hospital mergers: reorgs and staff turnover erased institutional memory of local workflows, temporarily degrading productivity and care coordination.[^3] - GAO study of a U.S. federal agency reorganisation: loss of program history and undocumented relationships after consolidation, requiring years to rebuild memory.[^4] [^1]: https://www.ft.com/content/d3b54cf8-30a1-11e6-bda0-04585c31b153 [^2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/media/11warner.html [^3]: https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k1128 [^4]: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-427