Deliberate Forgetting, Memory Had to be Rebuilt

When two legacy government agencies were merged, historical documents were shredded or burned from the old organizations, we lost an entire policy system. They probably did this so as to enable the new agency to start afresh. But in the new organization it created great difficulties in rebuilding documentation and history. We recreated knowledge via former employees who had retained old documents or by revisiting stored documents in boxes to recompile or reconfigure our knowledge. Bottom line: we lost organizational history. We had new work forces and very limited efforts to retain knowledge.

Sudden Attrition

This was a Fortune 500 company, with 50 years of history. 75% of senior level management retired within the past year after analysis that the company was top heavy. These people all had 25-40 years experience with the company. Who knows what the impact will be.

All Gone

Expertise can be relative. They may be "experts" for a while but their knowledge can be quite narrow in scope, and after a while their expertise can be forgotten or become irrelevant. For example, I was involved in he original team that developed an IT system which ran for several years. When it cam to the system revamp, they asked me to give them a hand, but I had forgotten everything I knew about it!