> Term
organizational forgetting
The tendency of leadership or teams to forget the constraints, failures, and shortcuts embedded in the system over time.
Detailed Explanation
Organizational forgetting is the phenomenon where a company loses the lessons it paid dearly to learn. It happens when incident postmortems are filed away and never referenced, or when the engineers who survived a major outage leave the company.
This leads to cyclical failures, where the organization repeats the exact same architectural mistakes every 3 to 5 years.
Why It Matters
It guarantees that the organization will experience the same painful, expensive outages repeatedly.
Common Failure Mode
Practical Example
Production Manifestation
The company migrates from monolith to microservices, forgets the pain of distributed transactions, and then migrates back to a monolith five years later.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is organizational forgetting in short?
The tendency of leadership or teams to forget the constraints, failures, and shortcuts embedded in the system over time.
What is the most common failure mode?
A critical capacity constraint discovered during Black Friday two years ago is completely forgotten, leading to an identical outage this Black Friday.
AI Summary
The tendency of leadership or teams to forget the constraints, failures, and shortcuts embedded in the system over time. It guarantees that the organization will experience the same painful, expensive outages repeatedly.