יום שישי, 13 במרץ 2015

Documentation of the Past is the Creation of the Future

Most leaders (people managers) don't have the time to document their actions: conversations with employees, performance management processes, performance improvement plans and additional leadership events. The main reason for this lack of documentation is that leaders just don't have the time in their daily lives to do so.

If it is not a part of the organization's regulations, or their own personal need, they postpone it and eventually forget all about it. Leaders should understand that documenting the past is a way to creating the future.

If they want to be proactive and create a habitual vision, they have to document almost every major step they make, especially with their team and their employees.

During World War 2, the most comprehensive effort to document ghetto life was undertaken in the Warsaw ghetto by a group of several dozen writers, teachers, rabbis, and historians led by Dr. Emmanuel Ringelblum in a secret operation code-named Oneg Shabbat (Hebrew for "Sabbath delight"). They wrote diaries, collected documents, commissioned papers, and preserved the posters and decrees that comprised the memory of the doomed community. They had no illusions. Their only hope was that the memory of the Warsaw ghetto would endure. They did it not for their present but for the others' future.

On the eve of the ghetto's destruction in the spring of 1943, when all seemed lost, the archive was placed in three milk cans and some metal boxes and buried in the cellars of several Warsaw buildings. They understood that by documenting the past they could help create and shape the future. They also understood that an event that wasn't documented eventually wouldn't exist because nobody would remember it.

The two containers that were found in 1946 and in 1950, contained copies of several underground newspapers, a narrative of deportations from the Warsaw ghetto, and public notices by the Judenrat (the council of Jewish leaders established on German orders).

By creating this archive, they saved the memory of this period which affected the historical events that happened after the war.

Despite repeated searches, the rest of the archive, including the third milk can, was never found.

If you want to be the leader for the future, take the time to document the past and help the Creation of the Future.


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