Past Past
Just imagine for a moment that you could remember everything that ever happened, what has ever been and what you have experienced. Absolutely everything, every detail, every sentence, every thought! At the latest then do you realise how important the past past is: much of what was will never return! Being able to forget and allow something to disappear is a necessity for psychological and social systems. That the past can really be experienced as the past, is a pre-condition for change. We know about people, who, throughout their life, have been unable to get over a terrible event; we know teams that mourn for a task which has ceased to exist ten years ago, and many organisations still feel like start-ups or regional businesses, when they already have a presence in forty countries.
To allow the past to pass, systems must withdraw their focus and their resources from the event, the project, the memory. Allowing something to die is easier said than done. But it is necessary to unburden oneself from past complexity, to restrict the management of data, and to be able to allow new stories to emerge. Not least for this reason it is presumed dysfunctional when the network forgets nothing and eliminates nothing.