We had an ESB that was a disaster.

It was a vendor proprietary system, which meant failures were difficult to debug. You could not just read the code. You waited for support tickets or reverse-engineered behavior from symptoms. The logs were useless, just walls of “ignorable errors” that everyone had learned to scroll past. Changes were manual, applied directly to production, with no rollback path if something went wrong. Every deployment was a held breath. The system had grown organically over years, accumulating complexity that nobody fully understood. On-call was punishment. People burned out or quit.

So we fixed it. Not overnight, but deliberately. We simplified the message flows. We documented the failure modes. We built monitoring that actually told us what was happening. We enforced standards that felt tedious at the time. Slowly, the chaos subsided. Deployments became routine. On-call became boring. The system started behaving like infrastructure should: invisibly.

Then senior management changed. Then lower management changed. New people arrived who had never lived through the chaos years. They looked at our processes and saw bureaucracy. They asked why we had so much “rigid overhead.” They questioned whether all this discipline was really necessary.

They had no memory of why it existed.

This is corporate amnesia. Not just when chaos makes people forget calm. When calm makes people forget chaos.

The Cycle Nobody Warns You About

Everyone talks about the journey from chaos to stability. Nobody talks about what happens after you get there.

Stability is self-erasing. The better it works, the less evidence it leaves behind. When the system is calm, there are no war stories. No dramatic incidents. No heroic recoveries. Just quiet, boring infrastructure doing its job.

New people arrive into this calm. They see process without context. They see standards without scars. They experience the stability as a given, not as something that was fought for and maintained. To them, the discipline looks like overhead. The documentation looks like bureaucracy. The enforced standards look like someone being controlling.

They start asking reasonable questions. Why do we have this approval process? Why can’t we just deploy directly? Why are there so many rules?

These questions feel reasonable because the questioners have no reference point. They have never seen what happens without the rules. The absence of chaos feels like the natural state, not the result of constant discipline.

How Organizations Unlearn

The forgetting happens in stages.

First, the people who lived through the chaos leave. They retire, burn out, get promoted, or move on. They take their scars with them. The institutional memory walks out the door in their heads.

Then, the documentation decays. It was written for people who remembered the context. Without that context, it reads as arbitrary. “Always do X before Y” without the story of what happened when someone did Y before X. The rules lose their weight.

Then, leadership turns over. New leaders inherit stable systems and see cost centers. They see process and headcount that seem excessive for something that “just works.” They did not see what it took to make it just work. They optimize for efficiency, not for memory preservation.

Finally, someone proposes a change. A simplification. A modernization. A way to reduce the overhead. The proposal makes sense on paper because the paper does not include the history. The approval process gets streamlined. The standards get relaxed. The documentation gets deprioritized.

The erosion begins.

The Questions That Signal Danger

When you hear these questions, the forgetting has already started:

“Why do we have all this process?” Because without it, deployments broke production weekly.

“Why can’t we move faster?” Because we tried moving faster, and it cost us six months of recovery.

“Why is this so rigid?” Because flexibility meant unpredictability, and unpredictability meant 3am pages.

“Do we really need all this documentation?” Yes. Because the alternative is tribal knowledge, and tribal knowledge leaves when people leave.

These questions are not malicious. They are rational responses from people who lack historical context. That is what makes them dangerous. The questioners are not trying to break anything. They genuinely cannot see what the discipline is protecting them from.

Why Stability Erases Itself

Stable systems produce no evidence of their own necessity.

When the ESB was failing, everyone knew it was failing. The incidents were visible. The pain was shared. The case for investment was obvious. Nobody asked why we needed to fix it.

When the ESB was stable, the stability was invisible. No incidents meant no stories. No pain meant no urgency. The case for maintaining discipline required imagination, not memory. You had to believe that the chaos would return if the discipline lapsed. That belief is hard to sustain when the chaos is years in the past and the discipline is costing money today.

This is the trap. The fix works so well that it hides the problem it fixed. Then people conclude the problem was never that serious. Then they dismantle the fix. Then the problem returns.

The Test

Ask your newest leader why your deployment process works the way it does. If they answer with a policy, you have documentation. If they answer with a story, you have memory. If they cannot answer at all, you are already on the way back.

What Actually Preserves Memory

You cannot preserve institutional memory by hoping people will remember. Memory has to be structural.

The scars need to live somewhere other than people’s heads. That means incident postmortems that survive leadership changes. Design documents that explain the “why” alongside the “what.” Onboarding that includes history, not just process. Standards that carry their own context.

But even this is not enough. Documentation rots when nobody maintains it. Postmortems get archived and forgotten. The “why” becomes separated from the “what” as systems evolve and documents do not.

The real answer is harder: someone has to defend boring. Actively, continuously, against the reasonable questions from people who were not there. Someone has to be willing to say “we do this because of what happened in 2019” and have the authority to make that stick.

In most organizations, that person does not exist. Or they exist but lack authority. Or they have authority but get tired of fighting. The defense of boring is a permanent rearguard action, and most organizations do not structure for that.

The Real Danger of Corporate Amnesia

Corporate amnesia does not just mean repeating mistakes. It means repeating them confidently.

The second time is worse than the first. The first time, you at least knew you were in unfamiliar territory. You proceeded carefully because you did not know what would break. The second time, you have false confidence. You “know” this terrain. You have “experience.” Except your experience is with the stable system, not the chaos underneath it.

Organizations that forget their chaos do not return to chaos carefully. They return to it at speed, making irreversible decisions based on assumptions that feel like knowledge. By the time the old patterns resurface, the people who would recognize them are gone.

How We Keep Our Memory

We document the scars, not just the solutions. When we write a standard, we write the incident that motivated it. When we build a process, we name the failure mode it prevents. When someone asks “why do we do this,” there is a story attached, not just a rule.

We treat turnover as a memory threat. When someone who lived through the chaos years leaves, we do not just backfill their role. We capture what they know about why things are the way they are. We build institutional history into onboarding, not as trivia but as context for the discipline we enforce.

We assume the questions will come. When new leadership arrives, we do not wait for them to ask why things are “so rigid.” We tell them first. We show them the before and after. We make the case for boring before anyone makes the case against it.

And we accept that this is permanent work. The defense of stability never ends. Every new hire is an opportunity for amnesia. Every leadership change is a risk. Every year of calm makes the chaos feel less real.

Boring is not a destination. It is a discipline you maintain against the gravity of forgetting.

boring (adj.)
The operational state where calm is enforced, memory is preserved, and reliability is ordinary because someone insisted on it.