Illustration by Maarten Huizing
A surgical team, a spacecraft crew, and your senior leadership team are each held together by something surprisingly intimate: a shared sense of who’s responsible for remembering what. Even close couples run on the same system. One partner can scale back their memory in a particular domain where their spouse has expertise. Based on this insight, the late social psychologist Dan Wegner originated the concept of “transactive memory systems.” Groups of people build a shared understanding—a system for who knows what—that works because each person can rely on the other’s expertise to coordinate daily life.
