Organizations can stall vital information in short-term memory much like individual minds do.

Evidence

Within the various intelligence agencies, moreover, attentional resources throughout this period were stretched extraordinarily thin. There were simply too many competing claims on agents’ and analysts’ attention, leaving information sitting and waiting to be processed. Metaphorically speaking, vital information was stalled in the organization’s short-term memory and never made it to long-term storage. In other cases, information was hurriedly passed on. Unfortunately, it was then forgotten with little follow-up: once moved off an agent’s desk, information that was “out of sight” often became “out of mind.” — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2001

Categorization

• XREF: The cognitive-science metaphor (short-term vs. long-term storage applied to organizations) parallels Hutchins’ distributed cognition and my existing notes on Deep Listening’s attentional scarcity themes.