Organisations don’t set out to forget how they were built, but over time memory becomes selective. Having worked for more than four decades and engaged in a range of companies, it’s interesting to look back and see how memory is preserved. 

In earlier chapters of Holding the Frame, I wrote about culture and the question: Who gets watered? Who gets pruned?.  This is also true for how history is recorded. While pruning is necessary for scalability and managing risk, the cost of careless pruning is the loss of coherence. 

As organisations corporatise and leadership transitions, the focus shifts toward structure, governance, and forward momentum.  In that process, what came before is often simplified, reinterpreted, or quietly set aside…sometimes becoming a repository for inefficiencies or unresolved tension.  This isn’t necessarily deliberate or malicious, but there’s a tendency to favour what’s visible, current, compliant, and more easily interpreted. 

In other words, institutional memory doesn’t disappear – it gets edited. The “official” record is often built from select interviews, documents, and reported results. This naturally shines the light on those who were most visible, articulate, or still present. Sometimes even informal stories or half-remembered anecdotes find their way into the official narrative. It tends to overlook the less visible roles –  the containers, the integrators and the culture carriers – the people who quietly held things together when the structure itself was still forming. 

These roles are rarely documented but they are often where the real continuity lives. During transitions, new leadership brings new frameworks, new people, new expectations and new ways of doing things  – “new brooms sweep clean”.  In the process, what once made sense in a more entrepreneurial era when deals were done on a handshake, can appear to be too informal or even flawed.

Context is the first casualty of transition. Culture becomes something that’s written down rather than something that’s understood. When people who held the informal culture are erased, learning is lost and there’s a risk of repeating patterns you think you’ve outgrown.  The hierarchy expands, but the new culture may feel brittle or sterile. 

Memory is never preserved in full, but the question remains: is it held with enough care to retain coherence? This doesn’t require grand archives or perfect records. Culture is primarily transmitted through story-telling. It requires recognising where memory actually resides – often in people, in relationships, and in the informal structures that don’t appear on organograms.  

It also requires allowing more than one version of events to coexist. The official record may provide structure, but lived experience provides texture. Both are necessary. Without structure, institutions fragment….but without memory, they drift. Holding both, without collapsing one into the other, allows for integration. 

In the end, organisations don’t just need systems that function – they need stories that make sense. 

And those stories are not always found in the places we expect.