Case File No. CA-000
Diagnostic Protocol: Corporate Amnesia v1
For internal review
“Have we not talked about this exact issue six months ago?” — asked in nearly every recurring meeting, right before nothing happens again.

Strategic Amnesia is the corporate tendency to forget its own decisions, promises, and plans shortly after making them. This case file walks your organization through a 16-point diagnostic and returns a stage of severity, a breakdown by symptom, and a prescription for each.

Presenting symptoms typically include:
  • Burnout — rehashing the same problems drains more energy than the original work
  • Distrust — people question whether leadership is serious, or competent
  • Disengagement — employees stop offering ideas, assuming they'll go nowhere
Organizational Memory — Live Read● standby
Awaiting intake— / 80
01

Intake

02

Symptom Review

For each statement, mark how often it happens. Answer for how the organization actually behaves, not how it's supposed to.

Symptom Group A

Ownership Clarity

Decisions leave meetings without a single named, accountable owner.

More than one person believes "someone else" is handling a decision.

Ask "who owns this?" three months later, and no one is fully sure.

Action items quietly change hands with no record of the handoff.

Symptom Group B

Follow-Through Speed

More than 24 hours pass before a decision is written down anywhere.

Meeting notes or action items are missing, inconsistent, or nobody's job.

Momentum from a decision fades before anyone actually starts on it.

Teams wait for a "formal" memo before they'll begin agreed-upon work.

Symptom Group C

Execution Tracking

There's no shared record showing what's actually been executed vs. discussed.

Leadership tracks meetings held and attendance, more than outcomes delivered.

The same initiative reappears on the agenda quarter after quarter with no visible progress marker.

No one could say, without digging, what share of last quarter's decisions were completed.

Symptom Group D

Meeting Hygiene

Recurring meetings continue even after they've stopped producing decisions.

New meetings get created before anyone checks whether an existing one already covers it.

A debate resurfaces in a new meeting because no one remembers it was already settled.

No standing meeting has ever been cancelled here for being unproductive.

0 of 16 answered

03

Diagnosis

Patient: —

—

—

04

Symptom Breakdown

05

Prescription

Ordered by severity — treat the highest-scoring symptom group first.

Diagnostic model adapted from "Corporate Amnesia: Why your company keeps forgetting its own plans" — O. Ojomo, InsightsWSC. This is a self-assessment for internal discussion, not a clinical or financial instrument.
Reset case file and start over