Case Studies

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A Corporate Memory System Helps Practitioners Learn From Others’ Experience

In an ideal work environment, any time an employee was about to make a major decision, and needed to weigh complex aspects of the consequences, an experienced colleague would suddenly appear, and be able to tell the soon-to-be decision maker a few relevant stories about what went right or wrong when similar decisions were made. Of course, this isn’t possible, but Socratic Arts has developed a system which can provide and/or deliver relevant stories, just-in-time, to support employees’ decision making.

Socratic Arts is working with the government and some major companies to help them get smarter over time. Why is that large organizations continue to make the same mistakes again and again? Because capturing/documenting lessons is not enough. What practitioners need is the capacity to access lessons from someone else’s prior experience precisely at the moment they are dealing with the same issues that have been encountered before.

Developing this type of system is no small task. There are many considerations – which decisions are most important? Who had these experiences and are they available to tell a story about that experience in a short video clip? What kinds of stories are relevant to each decision? How can stories be organized, or indexed, so that users can easily find them?

Leveraging Roger Schank’s 30+ years of research and work in this area, we have been building a tremendously intuitive, powerful system to help address big companys’ needs. The first stage of the system has been completed and clients have been sufficiently impressed with the results to invest in development on a larger scale.