What Does Your DMO Know That Isn't Written Down?

 

After spending many years in destination marketing, I came to appreciate something that rarely appears on a balance sheet: institutional memory has value. Every DMO has it. It lives in old files and board minutes, certainly, but much of it lives inside people. The longtime employee who remembers why the organization stopped working with a particular vendor. The sales manager who knows which meeting planner needs a phone call instead of another email. The finance person who remembers why a certain line appears in the budget. The CEO who knows the history behind an agreement with the city that everyone else assumes has always existed. None of that may be written down. Until that person leaves. Then someone inevitably asks, “Does anybody know why we do this?”

I've watched organizations spend enormous amounts of time recreating knowledge they once possessed. That's more than an inconvenience. It can cost money, damage relationships, repeat old mistakes, and leave new employees trying to understand decisions without knowing the circumstances that produced them.

We often discuss succession planning in terms of replacing people. I think we should also be talking about capturing what those people know before they walk out the door. Consider how much knowledge accumulates inside a DMO over the years. Vendor histories and contract decisions. Political relationships and community sensitivities. Lessons learned from festivals, conventions and sporting events. Research from studies conducted years ago. Agreements made with attractions, hotels and government partners. Procedures that developed because something once went terribly wrong.

And then there are the thousand little things nobody thinks about until they're needed.

Where is that photograph? Who has the password? Why don't we schedule that event during that particular weekend? Which community leader should hear about this before it becomes public? Who knows how that old database works? Someone usually knows. The question is whether the organization knows.

I believe CEOs should occasionally conduct an institutional-memory audit. Ask longtime employees what they know that isn't documented anywhere. Ask each department what information would disappear if someone unexpectedly left tomorrow. Record the stories behind major decisions, not simply the decisions themselves. And don't wait until someone's retirement luncheon to start asking questions.

Documentation doesn't need to become another bureaucracy. A shared digital archive, updated procedures, vendor notes, project postmortems, relationship histories, and even short recorded conversations can preserve enormous amounts of knowledge. I'd also capture the failures. Organizations tend to document successes because we're proud of them. Sometimes the more valuable institutional memory is knowing what didn't work—and why.

People will always leave organizations. They retire, accept new opportunities, move away, and sometimes leave unexpectedly. That's normal. But their knowledge doesn't have to leave with them.

A DMO spends years accumulating experience about its destination, its visitors, its partners, and its community. That knowledge is an organizational asset, just as real as research, technology, or a strong brand. The question every CEO should occasionally ask is simple: What does our DMO know today that we would have to rediscover tomorrow if the right person walked out the door?