In 2019 we had a fire that destroyed a good chunk of our personal belongings. As it always is with a fire, irreplaceable things that we would have handed down to future generations were suddenly gone. It was a sad day of grieving because it was such a huge loss of family history. History is important for future generations as a source of inspiration and context to stand on. Interestingly enough, if you think of it, organisations are the same way.

Your organisational heritage is like family silver. Precious items that represent tough times and good times. It is corporate knowledge and experiences carefully handed to the next generation for the value well beyond its initial worth. Sometimes due to an unexpected organisational disaster or sometimes by neglect or deliberate acts, it can be lost or thrown out. Like losing or throwing out the family silver.

A while back a friend of mine and I were doing some consulting for a charity and we noted that the rich heritage of the organisation was being lost. New senior leaders appointed to the organisation were coming in to put their own mark on the organisation, so they had a disregard for the organisation’s amazing history, to the point of despising it and even at times mocking it behind the scenes. Stories that were so unique, were being forgotten or worse buried by staff that picked up on the disdain. To amplify the effect, traditions to mark the major anniversaries were also being lost through neglect.

Sadly, due to a very short sighted view of what the organisation needed, these leadership appointments were only lasting a couple of years, resulting in the family silver being increasingly lost through each cycle, never to be recovered again. The organisation still exists to this day, but it is a shadow of what it once was and it was sad to plainly see that the potency of the original purpose of its founding and the stories that made it it extra special had been so senselessly discarded.

A few years ago back I helped organise a 40 year celebration for the organisation I was working with. While looking to the future, part of our goal was to preserve in corporate memory the precious things that we had experienced over the years that brought us to this point. As I mentioned in another blog, Drifting Towards the Rocks of Insanity, it is a posture of preserving what is timeless, but also recognising that what is not timeless may need to or have to change in order to grow forward. If you think of this beyond the defensive nature of it, preserving the right parts of history can really propel growth and keep something special that can last many, many years.

No one in their right minds would normally throw out the family silver, so how can you preserve it for your organisation?

• Make long term leadership appointments based on skills of what is needed to take things forward and a deep humility to embody the history, even though the leader was not there.
• Keep a healthy level of organisational history and story telling for staff as part of their orientation and onboarding.
• Create sacrosanct times in your calendar where you celebrate and recall the major parts of the history of the organisation.
• Continue to add to your history by intentionally capturing new significant events and stories to grow the family silver collection.
• Leveraging the digital age, establish a formal function for someone to be a ‘resident historian’ and dedicate resources to archive stories, photos and video.

If you don’t take these deliberate measures, over time you will discover the silver is missing bit by bit, until the point you realise most or all of it is gone! With a bit of organisational archeology you might be able to recover some items, but it will never be the same.

So, a little bit of deliberate direction setting by appointing future leaders with this in mind, some regular practices of pulling out the family silver and polishing it from time to time, and continually adding to the collection will go a very, very long way. Your organisation will be the better for it and it will long outlast anyone for years to come.