I lead a group of four people with bad memories.
This includes me, which is either very egalitarian or deeply unwise. Especially as it’s about my disability support.
On paper, leadership is about vision, strategy, clarity, accountability and direction. In practice, it is often about saying, “Did we agree who was doing that?” while everyone looks thoughtful, concerned, and completely blank.
There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a team when everyone knows a decision was made, but nobody knows what it was. It is not quite panic. It is more like group archaeology. We begin gently excavating the past.
- “Was that Tuesday?”
- “No, I think it was after the other thing.”
- “What other thing?”
- “The thing we forgot to do before this thing.”
And so leadership becomes less about command and control, and more about compassionate detective work.
Memory is not a moral quality
The first rule of managing people with bad memories is to stop treating memory as a measure of character.
Forgetting is not laziness. It is not disrespect. It is not proof that someone does not care.
Sometimes it is stress. Sometimes it is overload. Sometimes it is pain, disability, fatigue, grief, medication, too many moving parts, or simply being human in a world that expects us all to operate like synchronised cloud storage.
When a team forgets things, the least useful response is blame. Blame has a terrible memory too. It forgets context, capacity and kindness.
So we try not to ask, “Whose fault is this?”
We ask, “What system failed to catch this before it fell on my head?”
Much more useful. Slightly less satisfying. Better for morale.
Never trust a spoken agreement
A spoken agreement is a beautiful thing. It creates warmth, connection and the illusion of progress.
It is also, in our team, basically a butterfly.
It lands briefly, looks lovely, then disappears forever.
So we write things down. Ruthlessly. Repeatedly. Sometimes in several places, which creates its own exciting problem: remembering which place is the real place.
Still, writing things down is essential. Not because we are bureaucratic, but because we are honest.
If something matters, it needs to live somewhere outside our heads.
Our heads are already full. Some of them are full of brilliant ideas. Some are full of painkillers, appointments, half-remembered conversations, song lyrics from 1986, and the lingering dread that we have missed someone’s birthday.
A note is not an insult. A reminder is not a criticism. A checklist is not infantilising.
A checklist is love with bullet points.
Repetition is not nagging, it is infrastructure
In a team with patchy memories, repetition is not failure. It is the work.
We repeat decisions. We repeat dates. We repeat who is doing what. We repeat why we are doing it. Then we repeat the repeat, because the first repeat was probably during a distraction.
This can feel ridiculous until you realise the alternative is everyone confidently walking in four different directions, each carrying 25% of the original plan.
A good team rhythm sounds a bit like this:
- “So, just to check…”
- “What I heard was…”
- “Can someone write that down?”
- “Who owns that?”
- “When are we checking back?”
- “Did we already decide this, or am I hallucinating productivity?”
These are not signs of dysfunction. They are signs of a team building memory into the environment instead of pretending everyone has unlimited internal storage.
The person affected most should not have to remember most
This bit matters.
When forgetfulness in a team impacts one person more than others, especially in disability support or care contexts, the responsibility cannot sit mainly with the person most affected.
If I forget something, there are consequences. If the people supporting me forget something, there are also consequences — for me.
That does not make them bad people. It does mean the system has to be stronger than our individual memories.
The person relying on support should not have to become the human reminder app, emotional project manager, quality assurance officer and emergency backup brain.
That way lies resentment, exhaustion and eventually someone saying, “I’m fine,” in the tone that means absolutely no one is fine.
Build systems that survive ordinary chaos
Managing forgetful people is not about finding perfect people. Good luck with that.
It is about building ordinary, boring, humane systems that survive ordinary, boring, humane chaos.
Things like:
- Shared notes.
- Clear task ownership.
- One place for key information.
- Calendar reminders.
- Check-ins.
- Written summaries after conversations.
- Visual cues.
- Gentle prompts.
- Permission to say, “I’ve forgotten.”
- Permission to say, “Please remind me again.”
- Permission to laugh when everyone has forgotten the same thing, including the reminder to remember it.
The magic is not in any single tool. The magic is in removing shame.
Once nobody has to pretend their memory is better than it is, things improve dramatically.
Humour helps, but it cannot replace structure
Humour is essential. Without humour, a team of forgetful people can become tense, defensive and weirdly theatrical.
With humour, we can say, “Excellent, once again we have achieved collective amnesia,” and then calmly check the notes.
But humour must not become a way of dodging responsibility.
There is a fine line between “Ha ha, we’re all hopeless” and “Oops, another important thing fell through the cracks and now someone else is carrying the cost.”
The laugh is useful if it opens the door to improvement.
It is not useful if it becomes the whole strategy.
The goal is not perfect memory
The goal is not to become people who never forget.
That ship has sailed, hit a rock, forgotten why it was sailing, and is now somewhere near Waiheke.
The goal is to become people who recover well.
People who notice sooner.
People who apologise without collapse.
People who repair without drama.
People who design better systems after mistakes rather than just promising to “try harder”, which is often code for “I will feel guilty until I forget again.”
Trying harder is not a system.
A system is a system.
Leadership is remembering kindly
I used to think leadership meant holding the big picture.
Now I think it often means holding the thread when everyone else has misplaced the needle, the fabric and possibly the entire sewing basket.
But I also know I cannot be the only one holding it.
A good team shares the remembering. Not perfectly. Not always gracefully. Sometimes with three reminders, two calendar alerts, a text message and someone shouting from the next room.
But shared remembering is still shared care.
And when forgetfulness is met with kindness, structure and humour, something changes. People become less scared of getting it wrong. They become more willing to be honest. They stop hiding gaps. They start building bridges over them.
So yes, I lead a group of four people with bad memories, including me.
We forget things.
We repeat ourselves.
We lose the plot.
Then, on a good day, we find the plot again in the shared notes.
And honestly, that may be the most realistic model of leadership I know.
