Why every organisation should interview people before they retire

Not the documents; they can be filed away. Not the policies; they'll be sitting on a server somewhere. It loses the things that were never written down.

Why a particular decision was made. What nearly went wrong. The workaround that kept something running when it really shouldn't have. The personalities behind an important project. The arguments, accidents and unlikely moments that changed the direction of an organisation.

And, perhaps most importantly, what it actually felt like to be there.

I've spent a lot of time interviewing people for books and other writing projects, and one thing has become increasingly clear to me: people carry extraordinary archives around in their heads. The problem is that we often don't realise their value until it's too late.

Organisations are generally very good at recording information. Minutes are taken, reports are written, decisions are documented and strategies are carefully preserved. But they're often much less good at recording memory.

And there's a difference: a report might tell you what happened. It rarely tells you what people were thinking, what they were worried about, what made them laugh, or why something that looks perfectly straightforward in hindsight was anything but at the time.

Imagine interviewing someone who's worked for an organisation for 30 or 40 years, just before they retire. Not an exit interview. Not a tick-box exercise about their experience of working there. A proper conversation.

• What has changed?

• Who made a difference?

• What are you proud of?

• What do you wish people joining today understood?

• What happened here that nobody remembers anymore?

The answers might be funny, moving, surprising or occasionally uncomfortable. They might challenge the official version of events. They might reveal that something everyone now takes for granted only exists because somebody, somewhere, refused to give up on an idea.

And those are precisely the stories worth preserving. One conversation might produce an article. Twenty could become an oral history. They might feed an anniversary project, an exhibition, a book, an archive, induction material or internal communications. They might help new colleagues understand the culture they've joined, or give an organisation a richer understanding of where it has come from.

Or they might simply preserve stories that would otherwise disappear. But the immediate output almost matters less than the act of capturing them. Because organisations aren't really buildings, brands, strategies or organisational charts.

They're people. And people leave. Their stories don't have to leave with them.