Without memory, no continuity

When a story passed down becomes a life-saving reflex

On 26 December 2004, a massive earthquake strikes off the coast of Sumatra. Minutes later, a tsunami devastates the coasts of the Indian Ocean, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives.

Yet the Indonesian island of Simeulue lies very close to the epicentre. At Langi, in the north of the island, researchers measured waves more than ten metres high, arriving less than ten minutes after the shaking stopped.

Across the whole island, only seven deaths are recorded during the tsunamis of December 2004 and March 2005.

Why?

The inhabitants knew about smong.

In 1907, another tsunami had struck Simeulue. The memory of the disaster had passed through the generations in oral stories. The lesson was simple: after a strong tremor, if the sea retreats or behaves abnormally, head for higher ground immediately.

Researchers who interviewed survivors after 2004 found that all of them knew this story and knew what to do.

No server. No document management system. No sophisticated technological device.

A memory passed down for nearly a century had prompted the right action at the very moment it became vital.

This may be one of the clearest illustrations of useful memory: a trace of the past capable of informing a present decision.

We also remember to know who we are

For individuals, autobiographical memory does more than revisit the past.

Psychological research attributes three main functions to it in particular: guiding our behaviour, sustaining our social relationships and contributing to continuity of the self. In other words, we draw on past experiences to understand who we are today and imagine who we might become tomorrow.

Robyn Fivush has also shown how deeply autobiographical memory develops within a social and cultural environment. From childhood onwards, conversations about lived experiences gradually help organise a narrative of the self situated in time.

This does not mean that our memory is an exact recording of our history. It selects, reconstructs and reinterprets.

Continuity therefore does not mean standing still.

We change, sometimes considerably. But to perceive those transformations as part of our own story, we need to be able to connect a “before” with a “now”.

This individual mechanism also sheds light on what happens in families, businesses and territories.

An organisation can hold its archives and lose its memory

On 1 February 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrates as it re-enters the atmosphere. All seven crew members die.

The investigation does not stop at the technical cause of the accident. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concludes that the management practices and culture of the space programme contributed to the catastrophe as much as the physical impact of the piece of insulating foam that damaged the shuttle’s wing.

The comparison with Challenger, destroyed seventeen years earlier, is particularly disturbing.

Research into the two accidents reveals comparable organisational mechanisms: weak signals gradually treated as routine, anomalies becoming acceptable because they had not yet caused a catastrophe, and difficulties in escalating certain warnings.

Diane Vaughan points out that not all the systemic causes revealed after Challenger had been corrected when Columbia was lost.

Here is an essential distinction:

archiving a lesson does not mean turning it into organisational memory.

An organisation truly remembers when past experience remains capable of changing a present decision.

A team’s memory is also distributed. It does not reside solely in documents. Research on transactive memory systems shows how important it is also to know who knows what within a group. A meta-analysis covering 76 studies and 6,869 units of observation confirms a relationship between these distributed memory systems and team performance, while also showing that this relationship depends on context.

When a key person leaves, an organisation therefore loses more than files. It may lose reasons, relationships, ways of doing things, knowledge of past mistakes and sometimes even the ability to find the person who holds particular knowledge.

A photograph can reconnect a thread broken for decades

Family memory reveals the same difference between preserving and passing on.

Mala Malengreau is born into a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1938. After the war, her father leaves for the United States, where he starts a new family. His American children grow up unaware that they have a half-sister living in France.

Decades later, a cousin discovers photographs of Mala, her mother and her parents’ wedding among the belongings of a deceased family member.

Those few images set a search in motion.

Digitised documents from the Arolsen Archives help uncover further traces. An inquiry is eventually sent to their tracing team.

In March 2025, Mala is found in France. A few months later, the family reunites.

Here too, the documents did not “preserve” the family.

They made it possible to restore a continuity that had become invisible.

Remembering does not mean keeping everything

It would nevertheless be dangerous to conclude that a good memory consists of accumulating things indefinitely.

We forget. We select. We rephrase. An organisation must also be able to abandon routines that have become useless.

The aim is therefore not completeness.

A useful memory must preserve what will make understanding possible tomorrow: what happened, in what context, who was involved, why a decision was taken, what other possibilities existed, what resulted from it and how much certainty we can attach to the available traces.

This is also why an isolated document rarely provides sufficient memory.

Without provenance, relationships and context, it can become almost silent.

Put it into practice: the five-year test

Today, choose a decision, a story, a skill or an event that you consider important.

Now imagine someone who was not involved discovering it in five years’ time.

Ask five questions:

1. Will they be able to find out what actually happened?
2. Will they understand why that decision was taken?
3. Will they know who knew what and who was involved?
4. Will they be able to distinguish facts, testimonies, interpretations and hypotheses?
5. Will they have enough context to act in turn?

If the answer is no, you may have preserved traces.

You have not yet ensured that they can be passed on.

Preserving what allows us to continue

From Simeulue’s smong to NASA’s files, from an autobiographical memory to a rediscovered family photograph, the media are very different.

The mechanism, however, is remarkably similar.

Continuity does not come from preserving the past unchanged. It comes from our ability to maintain an intelligible connection with it.

This is precisely what is at stake in living memory: not remembering everything, but preserving, contextualising, connecting and passing on what will still make understanding and action possible when those who know today are no longer there tomorrow.

Philippe Contal