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Hey there, innovation champions!
Have you ever solved a brilliant problem, only to watch your team struggle with the same challenge months later—as if the solution never existed?
This phenomenon—what I call “organizational amnesia”—isn’t just frustrating. It’s costing your company time, money, and breakthrough innovations.
Let me share a story that taught me the true value of innovation memory…
The Calligraphy Commission That Changed Everything
When I was running my calligraphy business, I dreaded one task above all others: tracking my time.
As a creative, the very thought of monitoring each minute spent designing, lettering, or gilding felt like the antithesis of artistic flow. I wanted to create, not clock-watch!
But after one particularly painful project—a gorgeous wedding ketubah that took nearly twice as long as I’d estimated—I had a realization that transformed my business:
Without capturing what I’d learned, I was doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
So I gritted my teeth and built a simple system to track how long each component really took. The next time I bid on a similar project, I had actual data instead of optimistic guesses.
That small habit—preserving my experience for future reference—made the difference between a sustainable business and constant frustration.
Fast forward to today, and I’m seeing the exact same pattern play out in my rapidly growing grassroots democracy group. What started with twelve people in a living room has exploded to over 440 members in just a few months!
The Meeting Evolution Experiment
Our first few meetings were fairly straightforward. But by our third gathering, with forty attendees crammed into a living room, it was clear we needed to adapt—fast.
One leadership team member suggested an “action fair” with tables showcasing different teams and projects. It was a huge hit! Problem solved, right?
Not quite. By our fifth meeting, new challenges emerged. Half the room was experiencing our community for the first time, while others had heard my welcome speech multiple times and were ready to move on.
Another team member suggested a brilliant solution: staggered start times, with new members arriving earlier for orientation.
This constant iteration is the hallmark of innovation. But here’s the critical question:
Where was all this learning being captured?
Without a system to preserve these insights, we risked losing valuable innovations with each leadership transition, each new challenge, each evolution of our community.
That’s when I realized that this pattern extends to every innovative organization I’ve worked with, from startups to tech giants.
The Three Memories of Innovation
In my work with teams at companies like Meta and Google, I’ve discovered that innovation memory operates on three distinct levels, aligning perfectly with my Create the Impossible™ framework:
- Play Hard Memory
This is where organizations capture the spirit of experimentation and play that led to breakthroughs. It’s not just documenting what worked, but how the team approached the problem and the mindset that made innovation possible.
For instance, when a design team at a major tech company developed a revolutionary UI approach, they didn’t just document the final design. They captured the playful ideation process that broke them out of conventional thinking—the exact games and prompts that sparked their breakthrough.
Now, when they face similar challenges, they don’t just have the solution; they have the creative pathway that led to it.
- Make Crap Memory
This might sound counterintuitive, but the most innovative organizations I work with don’t just document their successes—they meticulously capture their “fascinating failures” and imperfect prototypes.
These aren’t failures in the traditional sense. They’re the necessary stepping stones to breakthrough solutions.
One software development team I know of created a “Museum of Fascinating Failures”—a digital archive where team members could explore abandoned prototypes, along with the insights gleaned from each attempt. This treasure trove has sparked more innovations than their catalog of successes ever did!
- Learn Fast Memory
The final level is about capturing the patterns of learning itself—how your organization translates experience into knowledge, and knowledge into innovation.
This includes documenting not just what you learned, but how you learned it. What questions unlocked new perspectives? What feedback mechanisms accelerated your understanding?
When organizations preserve these learning patterns, they don’t just solve today’s problems faster—they develop the capacity to tackle completely new challenges with greater agility.
Building Your Innovation Memory System
So how can you put these principles into practice in your own organization? Creating an effective innovation memory system doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are three simple strategies that I recommend:
- Capture in the Moment
Innovation insights are often most valuable when they’re fresh. Create simple rituals for documenting insights during or immediately after key moments:
- Five-minute reflection rounds at the end of meetings
- Voice memos captured on walks after breakthrough sessions
- Quick “What worked/What didn’t” notes in shared spaces
The key is making documentation so frictionless that it becomes second nature.
- Focus on Context, Not Just Content
When capturing innovations, include the context that made them possible:
- What constraints were you working with?
- What mindset or approach unlocked the breakthrough?
- What unexpected connections sparked the idea?
This contextual information is often more valuable than the solution itself, as it can be applied to entirely different challenges.
- Create Living Archives
Traditional documentation often sits untouched in dusty digital folders. Instead, create living archives that team members actually engage with:
- Story-based case studies that capture the human journey of innovation
- Visual timelines showing how ideas evolved
- Searchable repositories tagged with the types of challenges they address
The goal is to make your innovation memory accessible and engaging, not just comprehensive.
The Return on Memory
Organizations that master innovation memory don’t just avoid repeating mistakes—they accelerate their innovation capacity exponentially.
When each team member can build on the collective learning of the entire organization, breakthroughs happen faster. Challenges that once took months to solve can be addressed in days or even hours.
More importantly, your team’s innovation capacity becomes resilient to turnover, reorganizations, and leadership changes. The insights and approaches that drive your success aren’t just locked in individual minds—they’re woven into the fabric of your organization.
Your Challenge
So here’s my challenge to you this week: Identify one recent innovation in your team that deserves to be preserved. What insights, approaches, or lessons learned should be captured for future reference?
Take fifteen minutes to document not just what worked, but how your team arrived at the solution, including the playful experiments, imperfect prototypes, and learning patterns that made it possible.
Remember: Your next breakthrough might already exist in your organization’s past experiences—if only you could remember them.
Stay curious, stay playful, and keep creating the impossible!
I’d love to hear from you. What’s one way your organization preserves innovation insights? Click here to share your approach!
Senior Leaders: Ready to transform how your organization learns from experience? Book a complimentary Innovation Strategy Session and let’s explore how the Create the Impossible™ framework can help you build an innovation memory system that accelerates breakthroughs and preserves your team’s hard-won insights.
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