Your organization’s history allows you to draw critical insights from experience and lay the foundation for distinctive solutions that can set you apart from competitors. Use these seven strategies to harness your history:

1. Visit your archives or begin one. Understanding institutional history requires access to important documents, images, and artifacts.

2. Survey the organization’s history. This information will help you understand how history shapes beliefs about the institution today and fill in missing pieces that should be addressed.

3. Interview of departing, long-tenured employees. Such interviews often provide a history not covered in the written record.

4. Make the organization’s history accessible. Capture stories about the organization’s work and use them for marketing, publications, and social media.

5. Document lessons learned on significant projects and initiatives. Recognize that you can discover as much from failure as from success.

6. Seek historical perspective from the organization’s past before major decisions.

7. Talk at every opportunity about the organization’s history—iconoclasts, innovations, impact—and what it says about the organization you are or wish to become.

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