Organisational knowledge depreciates when routines stop being practised, so accumulated experience decays rather than being permanently banked.
Argote's studies of production learning found that cumulative output predicted productivity less well than recent output did, which implies knowledge is being lost as well as gained. Depreciation rates were substantial. The finding qualifies the learning curve: experience is a stock that leaks, through turnover, through records that go unread, and through routines that fall out of use.
In practice
- A team that has not performed the failover procedure in two years cannot perform it, whatever the runbook says.
- A factory restarting a line after a year's pause runs at the yields of a new line, not of the one it was.