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Wed 13 Jul, 2011 06:40 am
Context:
Principles are, unfortunately, rather like organization charts — a sketchy, convenient fiction. Real organizations have a flow of information and decision making that isn’t captured by the boxes and labels. Charts fail to take account of people and how they talk to one another, fail to take account of the “institutional memory.” They fail to take account of how experts can also be generalists, of how decisions taken at one level interact with those taken at another. Any schematic account of the brain will share the shortcomings of organization charts.
Not necessarily. Institutional memory means the policies and traditions of an institution. Those may be passed on as an ethos for the behavior of members of the instituion or as written records. A good example of institutional memory would be the Mandarins of the Chinese empires. They had both an ethos for how they would formulate policy and advise the imperial administation, and they scrupulously kept written records of their policies and actions, to which they referred when confronted with questions of policy or action.
I think it means established principles or even familiar customs.
Your family could be an "institution." If a work chart is developed and it has sister doing the gardening, it might not take into account that sister is frightened of snakes and bugs. The chart ignored the "institutional memory" of this family member and the rest of the family members who know this.
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