Conclusions and New Avenues for Research

Organizational knowledge has proven to be a very fruitful concept. It has provided researchers with a useful frame for exploring a wide range of topics, as the diversity of the chapters in this volume attests. Yet, while researchers have gained a much better understanding of how knowledge is created and transferred, there are still important dynamics of knowledge that remain unexplored. In this chapter, we have begun to discuss one of these dynamics, knowledge loss, and its role in knowledge processes in organizations.

We hope it is clear from our discussion up to this point that knowledge loss plays an important role in the dynamics of knowledge, a much more important role than its current status in the literature would indicate. While there have been some initial empirical investigations, the study of knowledge loss has been largely neglected, and as a consequence we are still theorizing without much evidence.

Our own empirical work indicates that organizations spend considerable time either trying to unlearn something that is no longer (or never was) functional or trying not to forget things that are highly valued but in danger of being lost. In fact, the organizations we studied spent much more time on these activities than they devoted to knowledge creation or transfer. Managing knowledge loss was a major management concern and consumed a surprising amount of time and effort. Both anecdotal evidence and initial empirical work are telling us that knowledge loss is important and deserves a much more central role in theorizing about knowledge. Researchers need to respond to this and explore the causes of knowledge loss and the mechanisms that underlie it in much more detail.

More specifically, there are several areas that deserve further exploration. First, we have seen that some types of knowledge loss are involuntary, what we call forgetting in our framework. Further research should explore the causes of forgetting, and the types of errors and mishaps that increase forgetting rates. More specifically, we need to explain why knowledge that is stored in an organization’s memory deteriorates over time, and what mechanisms prevent different parts of the organization from retrieving stored knowledge. Furthermore, we know that rates of forgetting vary across industries, but we don’t know why. And it would be useful to know whether rates of knowledge dissipation differ between organizations in the same industry, or even within the same multi-unit organization, and why. In short, we need to pay more attention to the causes of forgetting, and try to understand under what circumstances forgetting happens.

Second, some knowledge loss is voluntary; what we have termed unlearning. We have argued that this type of knowledge loss can be understood as an organizational capability that can lead to increased rates of learning and change. Because of the theorized impact of unlearning (and even more a lack of unlearning) in the success of change efforts, of particular interest would be studies that shed light on exactly how and why unlearning has an impact on success. Furthermore, it is clear from the discussions above that organizations often need to unlearn and that managers are often involved in unlearning, but how does it actually work? How do managers do it and what are the strategies they use to create unlearning? These are critical questions for researchers interested in the theory and practice of knowledge management.

Third, we have little understanding of why some new knowledge is successfully integrated into the memory system while other new knowledge is not. A promising avenue for researchers would be to study where knowledge is embedded in the organization (i.e. routines, structures, understandings, assets) and to explore the factors that prevent or facilitate knowledge from being embedded in each one of these dimensions. Knowledge may well crystallize in some cases and in other cases may not, but why and how remain to be explored.

Our study highlights the contextual nature of forgetting: while forgetting was a common phenomenon in the organizations we studied, the effect of forgetting is context-dependent. If critical knowledge was forgotten, then competitiveness was lost and forgetting would have been better avoided. But, if the forgotten knowledge was extraneous or was actively interfering with the application of more appropriate knowledge, then forgetting was a positive occurrence. In some cases, managing to avoid organizational forgetting is critical; in others, managing to maximize the loss of organizational knowledge is equally adaptive. This renews the call for more studies of learning and forgetting, as the question is always there: learning and forgetting are important but what are they, why do they occur, and when can we expect them to happen?

In sum, how organizations can unlearn the things they want to unlearn, and avoid forgetting the things they do not want to forget, is an important question for management researchers. Furthermore, it is a question that has not been studied sufficiently to date and has the potential to make a much more significant contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of organizational knowledge. Our discussion in this chapter begins to draw together a number of threads from the literature, but much further research and writing is required to come to a deeper understanding of this fascinating phenomenon.

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aSee Delarue, Jacques, Histoire de la Gestapo, Paris Arthème Fayard,1962. The authors are thankful to His Excellency Mr E. Calcagno y Maillmann, Ambassador of the Argentine Republic to France for referring the anecdote to us, and to Ms Virginie de La Fresnaye, Chargée de la Communication of the Hotel Lutetia for corroborating significant parts of the vignette.