Institutional Memory: Governing Purpose Across Time Without Myth

Institutions routinely fail not because of resource scarcity or weak leadership, but because they struggle to preserve purpose across time. Intent is repeatedly restated, symbolically reaffirmed or culturally invoked, yet becomes progressively diluted as organisations undergo leadership change, legal restructuring and generational turnover. These failures are typically attributed to problems of culture, incentives or execution. This paper argues instead that they arise from a more fundamental limitation: the absence of institutional arrangements capable of preserving purpose independently of organisational form. The paper develops a conceptual model of institutional memory in which purpose is treated as an explicit object of governance rather than an implicit feature of culture, narrative or authority. By separating purpose from roles, narratives and organisational containers, the model explains how institutional intent can persist through structural change without reliance on myth, cultural continuity or enforcement. Institutional continuity is reframed as a problem of purpose preservation rather than organisational stability. The paper positions institutional memory failure as a structural rather than cultural phenomenon, and examines its implications for public institutions, philanthropy and other long-horizon organisations operating under leadership volatility and temporal discontinuity. Treating purpose as something that must be governed rather than remembered opens a research agenda focused on how institutions can sustain meaning across time without depending on individual actors or inherited narratives.