Institutional memory

Institutional memory is a collective set of facts, concepts, experiences, and knowledge held by a group of people, representing the stored understanding that accumulates within an organization over time. It encompasses the practical solutions, workarounds, and lessons that members pass on to newcomers, which prevents redundant problem-solving and helps preserve organizational efficiency, and it depends critically on continuity of membership: when departing members share their knowledge with incoming ones, the organization retains its collective experience, but if a whole group of members leaves at once, that accumulated understanding can be lost and has to be redeveloped from scratch. Such memory exists across corporations, professional associations, government institutions, religious organizations, and whole societies, where it can help maintain established practices and shared ideologies, though it can also become so entrenched that a group continues outdated procedures even after the circumstances that produced them have changed. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/