Memories

One of the most misunderstood functions of the human mind is memory and how it works.  Many people believe that our brains are like recording devices, storing video clips of the events that happen to us.

Cool idea, but so not how it works.  For years, neuroscience believed that "constructed" memories, or memories that had been adequately built in our brains were stable and not subject to change.   This theory has been called into question lately - here is a link to great article in Smithsonian Magazine on the topic.

How our Brains make Memories

If this new theory is proven, that will mean that each time we remember something, we reconstruct the memory from the stored pieces of memory in the brain.  In the act of reconstruction, we can change the emotional impact the memory has on us.

This is potentially breakthrough information to help people recover from post traumatic stress disorder, but it is also very valuable information for everyday life.

One of the other factors that plays into how memory works is how our brain manages the large volumes of ambiguous information we take in.

How Your Brain Decides Without You

Because we all see not only through our eyes, but through our cumulative life experience and how that has patterned our brains, it is very unlikely that you will ever find two people who remember the same event in the same way.

Why is this important to you as a leader?  If we depend on memory to repeat successful performance, we are stacking the deck against ourselves.  While it is impossible to write a procedure for everything, some things simply must be written down.  When undesirable outcomes occur, if we focus our investigation on interviews and eyewitness reports, we will typically find that the "facts" reported differ by individual.  Another problem that will likely occur is that people "see" and "remember" what they expected to see, so true anomalies will go unobserved and undetected.

Your job as leader is to reliably identify those processes that must be carefully documented so that they can be repeated.

It is also your job to accept no one account of what created an undesirable outcome.  The best course of action is to focus on how the desirable outcome could have been created, and then build safeguards into your system to guarantee the desired outcome.  Because memory is unreliable, and most data sets are incomplete, trying to reconstruct history is a very flawed undertaking.

By focusing your energy on the key activities that create successful outcomes, and providing supporting documentation so that these key activities can be successfully repeated, you will strengthen your organizations ability to succeed.

Next post we will talk about how to help your individual employees evaluate their own performance and outcomes and independently determine how to achieve better outcomes.