Can’t Remember What I Forgot: Capabilities’ Cognition in a Situation of Organizational Forgetting

The article deals with the question of capabilities' cognition in situations of "organizational forgetting". It proposes to cross the fields of research about capabilities' cognition and organizational forgetting around the following question: how can cognition about lost capabilities be facilitated or prevented? The article explores the case of an organization involved in complex engineering projects and identifies three main loci of contradictions that translate the difficulty for actors to make sense of a situation of forgetting: perceptions about the performance, about the needed capabilities and about the past capabilities of the organization. Organizational forgetting thus have a double effect: the erosion of capabilities as much as the ability to know the latter. In such situations, the advantages of causal ambiguity are more likely to turn against the organization and the importance of capabilities' cognition is reinforced.