One of the most important things that Mensa must do as an organization is take care of its assets — our assets. Assets such as money, reputation, and volunteer resources come readily to mind. But there is another asset, one that is just as essential to our thriving as an entity, that we sometimes forget to count.
In the business world, corporate memory or institutional memory is regarded as an asset that is worth much effort to safeguard and preserve. The field of knowledge management, with its emphasis on electronic storage and retrieval systems, is one answer to the need for retaining and building upon what is essentially the history of an organization. Nevertheless, says Ray Schneider,
Corporate memory is often embodied in the skills and project memories of the 'old hands' that created the technology or the products. It is usually not feasible to store it in documents or other non-human storage mechanisms because so much of it is lived experience and not very easily communicated, often because the persons that do it don't really know how they do it. It's a matter of instinct and feel developed from experience doing it. A lot of knowledge is like that.1
An assistant professor of math and computer science who has more than 35 years' experience in research and development of both hardware and software, Schneider writes as an expert in information technology.
While underscoring the need for passing the torch of knowledge from hand to human hand and not simply from one mindless database to another, Schneider's observation also points to an important distinction between knowledge and information. In assessing how knowledge management systems in the past have fallen drastically short of their dream potential,2 knowledge management consultant Denham Grey writes:
We failed to clearly appreciate and understand that we were storing information, that context is key, content without community is not king, feedback, critique, continual validation and annotation [are] everything, information has a social side, knowledge flows via relationships not via access to static content.3
Indeed, it is the presence of the mind in the formula that is the key difference in dictionary definitions of information and knowledge. In distinguishing among synonyms of knowledge, the American Heritage dictionary (third edition) says: "Knowledge is the broadest; it includes facts and ideas, understanding, and the totality of what is known. . . . Information is usually construed as being narrower in scope than knowledge; it often implies a collection of facts and data. . . . " Information, in other words, is something that is known, whereas knowledge requires a knower; and the knower possesses not only information but also comprehension, perception of interrelationships, interpretation, logic, intuition, and more — all the things, in fact, that human intelligence brings to bear upon raw experience, observation, and accumulated data.
As important as it is in a business setting to transfer knowledge forward across time, or, as the Public Service Commission of Canada puts it, to "repatriate experience," there may be an even greater need in a volunteer organization. In a commercial enterprise, there is an understood and universally practiced recognition of the need to capture, store, and retrieve business records; no profit-making organization could survive without keeping track of its transactions and decisions and making its collective knowledge of how to conduct its business accessible to generations of employees. In a volunteer-run organization, history may be much more informally kept and much more easily forgotten. Writing in the website of Energize, Inc., an international training, consulting, and publishing firm specializing in volunteerism, president Susan J. Ellis says:
One of the most frustrating aspects of change in organizations is that new ways of doing things seem to spring up without any consciousness of what happened in the past. This is particularly relevant to volunteerism, since agencies have high turnover in volunteer program management positions and all-volunteer associations rotate officers with every election. Too often the newcomers initiate change simply because of their own preferences or the wish to establish a 'new administration.' They fail to ask an important question first: Why and how did we end up where we are now? No one wants to be immobilized by resistance to change based on 'we tried that ten years ago and it didn't work.' On the other hand, we are all too busy to reinvent the square wheel or duplicate the hard efforts of predecessors. The key is to do some research before we set off in a new direction. 4
Ellis goes on to suggest creation of the post of Continuity Officer to serve as keeper of the institutional memory, making sure that transmittal of information occurs between outgoing and incoming officeholders and bringing pertinent accounts of the group's past experience to the attention of the governing board as it considers its current actions.
As a volunteer-run organization, Mensa does face many typical challenges; but even though our officers turn over, we have a great deal of longevity in our membership as a whole. While encouraging young members to become active, we treasure our senior members because continuity is a key value in Mensa. Respect for the experience and knowledge of predecessors is built into our structure. The principle is expressed in the bylaws-mandated continuation of the two most recent past AMC chairmen as voting members of the board beyond the completion of their terms of office. It is reflected in the handbooks and resource materials published for the benefit of national and local group officers, appointees, and other volunteers. It is the motivating force behind LDWs and the sustaining energy of e-lists such as those for editors and webmasters. At every level of the organization, formal and informal structures are in place to ensure that no volunteer has to start from scratch, no hard lessons have to be learned anew by every novice officeholder, and no volunteer has to bear the weight of responsibility or authority without the support of experienced peers.
For those who are starting out in local group or SIG positions — editor, local secretary, coordinator, other officer — and wondering what to do and how to do it, the lesson is simple: avail yourself of all the resources at your disposal, and especially that of the veteran with valuable experience to share: "not harping on the past," says an editorial in Georgetown University's student paper The Hoya, "but using it as a tool, is one way to insure what we love now will become a long-term part of the community."5 Don't hesitate to ask, and don't be afraid to cross group lines if you can't find the help you need locally. National e-lists, both official and unofficial, are an especially good way to access the broader field of M knowledge.
And for the members who have been there, done that, the past local group officers and editors, the one-time SIG coordinators, the former AMC officeholders and appointees, many still active in the organization and many more retired from active duty, their most crucial role may still be ahead: they are the embodiment of Mensa's institutional memory and assurance of continuity, the guardians of history and conservators of lessons learned. We do not want to return to the past, nor do we want the past to cling to us like mire from the bottom of the pit; but we do want to remember the things we ought not to forget. Simply by virtue of having been there, these members are among Mensa's chief assets, whose worth cannot be overrated.
Meredy Amyx, a life member, is a former volunteer editor of Beacon, the Bulletin, Intelligencer, and the second edition of the Mensa Editor's Handbook.
1. Wikipedia
2. "One of the central themes of KM [knowledge management] is the design, building and maintenance of an effective 'corporate memory', a repository, a dare I say it, knowledge-base. Here the intellectual jewels of the organization will reside, easily accessible, expertly indexed, intuitively browseable. Here experts and novices will come for self-help knowledge, they will find the correct solution quickly, be able to apply the solutions with confidence, and learn from the 'collective experience of the organization'."—Denham Grey
3. Denham Grey
4. Susan J. Ellis [italics as in original]
5. "Lack of Institutional Memory Dooms Clubs to Repeating Past," by Aaron Kass.