Avoiding the Mistakes of Memory

Okay, this is embarrassing. I read halfway through a study intending to blog on it, finding it interesting but also trying to recall a similar study it reminded me of. Suspicions grew. I checked Teams Blog, and sure enough: I’d wasted 30 minutes re-reading a study I blogged about in September.

Mistakes of memory are far more pervasive than we realize, as a five-year project is reminding me. At my mother’s behest, I have been writing my autobiography. As I always say upon revealing this fact, I consider writing my memoirs the ultimate act of egotism, especially given that I haven’t accomplished anything of great import. But when your mother asks you to do it…

The most fascinating part of the exercise has been comparing my memories with my records. I have books I dictated at age 4, letters to and fro dating to age 2, school papers, the typical angst-filled journals of adolescence, and calendars from age 16 on. After two drafts written from memory, for the third draft I went through these records, and Mother has read the result. I am pleased that most of what I recalled that could be corroborated was so. However, significant moments I would have sworn in court were true turned out to be either entirely false or off on significant details.

An example comes from a month or so after my father died of leukemia. I was 10, in fifth grade. My mother and teachers were appropriately indulgent for a while on the matter of homework, but after a certain point it was clear I was using the death as an excuse. One day my teacher called me on it, gently but firmly. Only, she wasn’t my regular fifth-grade teacher, as I long thought. I had merged her in memory with my fourth-grade teacher Ms. Rockwood, a spunky redhead on whom I had a crush, and swapped Ms. Rockwood with my regular fifth-grade teacher Ms. McClain. We must have been pulled out to other classrooms for certain subjects. As I admit in a footnote, “When I found my report cards… I had to swap chunks of the Age 9 and Age 10 chapters.”

Ten years later I toured with a college drama troupe throughout the southeastern United States. This was the highpoint of my school career, and I recounted the performance dates and locations numerous times over the years. In reviewing my calendar, I found my location memories were mostly correct, but the order of events was badly off. We played at our school in the fall, not the winter trimester, and I had reversed in time the two major phases of the tour.

Another issue with memory is that our brains leave out stuff we don’t want to retain. At 16 I suddenly recalled a memory I had repressed from an event five years earlier—nothing traumatic, fortunately, but it explained my active refusal to date as a teenager. My very visible response was witnessed, so I know the sudden recall happened. This repression can occur within a gap of seconds, too. When I was married, my wife caught me claiming I had not done something moments earlier that I indeed had. I was not lying; I honestly thought I had not done it. Only when I made myself re-run the video in my head did I realize she was right. I admitted it, but was dumbfounded. The original act had been so discourteous, I could not believe it.

The research on memory makes any criminal conviction based solely on witness testimony suspect. Studies have shown that every time you access a memory, you risk contaminating it with similar memories or current events. Memory is heavily filtered by our religious, political, and philosophical values. In experiments, even when tested immediately after an event, witnesses come up with extremely different descriptions. Assault victims have sworn in sincere belief that a person had attacked them only to have DNA prove later it was someone else.

Plus, the brain plays tricks on us. The well-known phenomenon of seeing frightening events in slow motion? I have experienced it. But recent research shows the slow-down effect does not occur at the time of the event. We simply recall the event in slow motion.

The reason I raise the issue is the tendency of work teams to rely on memory. Teams regularly waste time re-discussing decisions because they can’t recall what they decided as recently as a week earlier. They fail to carry off process improvements agreed on verbally but not written down. Don’t forget the finger-pointing when two people each think the other had said they would do something, or when someone forgets they had agreed to complete a task by a certain date. I have interviewed software developers who could not recall why they had done something in their own code, making it impossible to explain to peers, much less customers. Even the biggest supporters of the Agile Manifesto, which specifically calls for limiting documentation, recommend a degree of it when teams are making decisions about the next few weeks of work.  

The fallibility of memory means your team will waste time, stress, and possibly money if you do not document its decisions by:

• Creating action items for all decisions.
• Writing standard operating procedures.
• Creating dated reminders whenever you personally commit to doing something.
• Taking meeting notes and reviewing them at the start of the next relevant meeting.
• Writing down performance expectations in the form of measurable goals and desired behaviors.
• If witnessing bad behaviors, maintaining a journal of the specifics to protect yourself legally in case things go very wrong.

Fortunately, I made my blogging mistake in a situation where I could check records. Although I lost a half hour in reading time, I saved myself the other three or four hours I might have wasted in finishing the post. Even better, I saved myself the embarrassment of posting, rather than merely posting about, my mistake to the entire wired world! Your team will not usually be that lucky. The time you invest in jotting things down will save you much more over your career.

P.S. Recently I accepted a full-time contract at a software company. Although all TeamTrainers services and classes remain available, the time demand of writing this blog is too great for me to keep up the weekly pace. I’ll look forward to chatting with you biweekly after taking a holiday break.