Your Strategic Memory Score
A ten-question assessment on institutional memory. Output: a memory score, the specific decisions most at risk of being re-litigated, and the lowest-cost fix.
Who it’s for: CMOs, heads of PMM, and founders worried that the team keeps re-learning lessons it has already paid for.
Can a new hire find out why your current pricing model was chosen?
Read it honestly, not charitably.
Four memory bands, ranked by the habits your own answers describe. The winner is where your team currently operates — not where your org chart or tooling suggests you should.
A team that lands “Tribal” can look indistinguishable from “Compounding” in good quarters. The test is what happens in a bad quarter, or when a leader rotates out. If the team can keep going without them, you’re at Documented or better. If not, you’re Tribal.
The distribution matters. A band of 40% Tribal / 35% Documented usually means you’ve started writing things down but haven’t retired the tribal knowledge yet. That is fine; it’s a transition state. Keep moving.
Three moves you can make this week.
- Start a decision log this week. Three columns: what, why, traded off. Do not spec the perfect tool or template. A Google Doc is fine. Tools matter less than the habit.
- Run the Strategic Memory Maturity checklist against your current setup. The checklist names the 10 artifacts that actually have to exist. Use it to triage.
- Install a monthly 30-minute memory review. One person, 30 minutes, once a month: log this month's decisions, re-validate three old ones, retire any that no longer apply. Without the cadence, the docs decay quietly.
Why these questions, in this order.
Ten questions across three axes — decisions, habits, artifacts — because memory failure has three different shapes. A team can write documents (artifacts) without using them (habits) or referencing them when making new decisions. Scoring each axis separately would hide the pattern.
We cut questions about specific tools (Notion, Confluence, ClickUp). The platform is almost irrelevant; the ritual is everything. A Notion doc that gets read beats an enterprise wiki that doesn’t.
Run the full Strategic Context.
The shared memory that makes every other tool smarter over time.
- Your Positioning PersonalityChallenger, category creator, fast follower, or commodity?
- How Strategically Mature Is Your Team?Twelve questions → level 1 (chaotic) to level 5 (operationalized).
- What's Your Strategic Blind Spot?Messaging, competitors, customers, or internal alignment — which is neglected?