§ Research

Methodology, working papers, and the field literature we build on.

The Project is not a pundit. We work within the published organizational-behavior and knowledge-management literature, extend it where it is thin, and release everything we find under open license.

§ A · Methodology

Four instruments, applied in concert.

i.

Knowledge audit

A structured inventory across four canonical categories — conscious, codified, automatic, collective — administered to a representative sample of teams within the participating firm. Modeled on the audit instrument from JKM (2018).

  • Average duration: 3.4 weeks
  • Sample frame: ~12% of headcount, stratified by tenure
  • Output: weighted knowledge inventory with risk index per item
ii.

Departure interviews

Long-form qualitative interviews conducted within 60 days of separation. Designed to surface the knowledge employees did not realize they held — by walking through specific past situations rather than asking "what did you know."

  • Protocol: 60–90 min, semi-structured
  • Interviewer: independent (not the employee's manager)
  • Anonymized transcripts coded by two researchers
iii.

Search-cycle telemetry

With the firm's consent, we instrument anonymized aggregate data on internal information retrieval — how long an employee searches before finding, abandoning, or asking a person. The telemetry surfaces not what people know, but what they cannot find that they should.

  • Median search time, by question class
  • Abandonment rate; ask-a-human rate
  • Document staleness at point of access
iv.

Retrospective failure mapping

For each material project failure or near-miss in the study window, we trace whether the contributing knowledge had previously existed somewhere in the organization. The fraction of failures attributable to lost-but-previously-known knowledge is our headline KLR (Knowledge Loss Ratio) metric.

  • Coding: independent two-researcher protocol
  • Inter-rater reliability: κ = 0.81
§ B · Working papers

Our outputs to date.

  1. WP-24-01
    Mar 2024

    Anatomy of a Forgetting: A Year-Long Field Study of Knowledge Decay in Three Mid-Market Firms.

    We instrument three 400–800 person firms across a calendar year and document the rate, mechanisms, and consequences of accidental knowledge loss. KLR ranges from 0.31 to 0.58 across the three sites.

    field studyn = 3 firmslongitudinal
  2. WP-24-02
    Jul 2024

    The 60-Day Window: Recovering Tacit Knowledge from Departing Employees.

    We test six exit-interview protocols against a control. The most effective format — an unstructured walk-through of three past situations — recovered 7.2× more codable tacit knowledge than the conventional checklist.

    experimentn = 142 interviewsturnover
  3. WP-25-01
    Feb 2025

    The OAQ-12: A Short-Form Diagnostic for Organizational Amnesia.

    Construction and validation of a 12-item self-report instrument. Correlates r = 0.74 with the 84-item full instrument; recommended for triage rather than diagnosis.

    instrumentpsychometricsn = 1,284
  4. WP-25-02
    Sep 2025

    Generational Handover and the 20-Year Cycle: Re-examining the PMI Finding in Software-Era Firms.

    The PMI observation of memory collapse on a generational cycle in century-old institutions appears to compress dramatically in software firms. We find an analogous pattern at ~6 years in companies of 8–14 years' standing.

    longitudinaln = 27 firmshandover
  5. WP-26-01
    Feb 2026

    The Cost of What Is Forgotten: A Direct-Cost Estimator for Organizational Amnesia.

    We build a parametric model that converts knowledge-audit and search-telemetry inputs into a defensible per-employee dollar cost of amnesia. Median cost: $2,360 / employee / year. The interactive calculator on this site is a simplified surface over this model.

    economic modeldirect costn = 18 firms
  6. WP-26-02
    forthcoming

    Amnesia After Acquisition: Knowledge Loss in the First 18 Months Post-Merger.

    In progress. Tracks the trajectory of knowledge retention through 14 acquisitions of firms in the 200–2,000-employee range.

    longitudinaln = 14M&A
  7. WP-26-03
    forthcoming

    Synthetic Memory: Retrieval-Augmented LLMs as Compensatory Organizational Memory.

    In progress. An evaluation of RAG-and-agent stacks deployed as institutional memory substitutes — what they recover, what they hallucinate, and where they introduce new failure modes the org used to be protected from.

    AIRAGn = 9 deployments
§ C · Selected bibliography

The literature on which the project rests.

  1. [1]de Holan, P. M., & Phillips, N. (2004). Remembrance of things past? The dynamics of organizational forgetting. Management Science, 50(11), 1603–1613.
  2. [2]Massingham, P. R. (2018). Measuring the impact of knowledge loss: A longitudinal study. Journal of Knowledge Management, 22(4), 721–758.
  3. [3]Galan, N. (2023). Knowledge loss induced by organizational member turnover (Part I & II). The Learning Organization, 30(2).
  4. [4]Mariano, S., Casey, A., & Olivera, F. (2018; 2020). Studies of organizational forgetting and knowledge loss clusters. Management Decision; JKM.
  5. [5]Kransdorff, A. (1998). Corporate amnesia: Keeping know-how in the company. Butterworth-Heinemann.
  6. [6]Argote, L., Darr, E., & Epple, D. (1995). The acquisition, transfer and depreciation of knowledge in service organizations. Management Science, 41(11), 1750–1762.
  7. [7]Argote, L. (2013). Organizational learning: Creating, retaining and transferring knowledge (2nd ed.). Springer.
  8. [8]Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. University of Chicago Press.
  9. [9]Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press.
  10. [10]Davenport, T. H., & Prusak, L. (1998). Working knowledge: How organizations manage what they know. Harvard Business School Press.
  11. [11]Walsh, J. P., & Ungson, G. R. (1991). Organizational memory. Academy of Management Review, 16(1), 57–91.
  12. [12]Project Management Institute. (various). Pulse of the Profession. Annual reports on lessons-learned discipline and institutional amnesia in mature firms.
  13. [13]Parise, S., Cross, R., & Davenport, T. H. (2006). Strategies for preventing a knowledge-loss crisis. MIT Sloan Management Review, 47(4).
  14. [14]McKinsey Global Institute. (2012). The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies. Estimates knowledge workers spend 19% of working time searching for information.
  15. [15]Panopto & Iterators. (2018; updated 2023, 2025). Workplace Knowledge and Productivity Reports. Per-employee cost of knowledge loss; baseline figure $2,400/yr.
  16. [16]International Data Corp. (cited via Stravito, 2025). Estimate of $31.5B in annual Fortune 500 losses to forgotten organizational knowledge.
  17. [17]Gartner. (2023). Knowledge work productivity. 47% of knowledge workers struggle to find information needed to do their jobs.
  18. [18]Bain & Company. (2024). Transformation insights. 88% of business transformations fail to meet original ambitions; recurrence-of-known-failure rates discussed.
  19. [19]Lewis, P. et al. (2020). Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks. NeurIPS. Foundational paper for RAG, the AI memory pattern most commonly deployed against organizational amnesia.
  20. [20]Wikipedia. (current). Corporate amnesia; Organizational memory; Knowledge management. Useful entry points to the broader literature.

If we can predict, within a year, which knowledge an organization will lose — we can keep it.

Run the diagnostic→ Estimate the cost→ Reading list→