Strategic initiatives often falter not due to lack of intelligence or effort, but due to a lack of institutional memory. When decisions are made in a fragmented way – one team decides based on their limited info, another team repeats research already done – the organization suffers. History starts to repeat itself. Mistakes are remade, and waste is magnified because lessons from the past weren’t retained (The Risk of Institutional Memory Loss). Traditional documentation methods (like static reports or ad-hoc meeting minutes) rarely capture the full context of decisions or make it easy to apply past learnings. As one knowledge management expert put it, “Knowledge is hard to gain, harder to maintain, and even harder to retain… holding on to that knowledge is the key to success.” (Importance of Capturing Institutional Knowledge | Bloomfire) In other words, an organization’s hard-won insights and experiences are a strategic advantage – if they can be preserved. Unfortunately, many strategy and ops teams lack a systematic way to retain and recall those insights. Critical decisions might be made in a quarterly planning session, but six months later, few remember the rationale. Team members leave, taking tacit knowledge with them, and new hires struggle to find past information. The result is fragmented decision-making: each new project or crisis is tackled in isolation, often without referencing prior outcomes. This fragmentation leads to inconsistency and missed opportunities. In fact, the loss of key personnel (and the institutional knowledge they carry) can directly result in missed strategic opportunities and costly delays (). When an organization lacks memory, it’s stuck in a perpetual novice state – every decision feels like starting from scratch. Why do traditional methods fail to retain past learnings? The challenge is that static documents and human memory are fallible. Meeting notes get buried in shared drives, and lessons learned files are forgotten soon after they’re written. People are naturally inclined to focus on the next big goal rather than revisit old decisions, as Dean Brenner notes: we tend to “move on quickly to the next thing,” even if prior lessons are “begging to be noticed and retained” (The Risk of Institutional Memory Loss). Without an intentional system to capture and recall knowledge, even a well-thought-out strategy can fall victim to corporate amnesia (sometimes called “institutional forgetting”). The cost of this forgetting is high: teams repeat research, duplicate efforts, and risk making decisions that contradict past choices or company policy. This is why strategy needs memory. A strategic plan is not just a one-time document – it’s a living process that should evolve with continuous learning. By maintaining a memory of decisions – what was decided, why, and with what results – organizations can avoid the trap of fragmented strategy. They can ensure continuity even as team members change. In short, building a memory bank of strategic decisions leads to more consistent execution and improved operational efficiency. Decisions stay aligned with long-term objectives because the context behind them isn’t lost in the shuffle. One effective way to create this institutional memory is by implementing a decision engine. A decision engine serves as a central brain for your strategy: it remembers past decisions, enforces consistent logic, and learns from outcomes so that each new decision benefits from collective experience. Let’s dive into what exactly a decision engine is and how it addresses the memory problem.