What Was Your Name Again?
©2023, George J. Irwin. All rights reserved.

Trust me when I say this has happened to everyone, and if you don’t consider yourself to be part of Everyone, you’re lying.

I was on a call with a supervisor, providing a debrief of a problem solving session that I’d facilitated the previous week. I was about to relay a really good recommendation made by one of this supervisor’s direct reports which was made during the session...

...and then I completely forgot this person’s name.

Lean Six Sigma Practitioners are prone to this problem, just like others who work with a lot of people in a relatively short period of time. It’s my belief that this is worse when you are only working virtually; you may only see a face in one small part of your computer monitor, or hear a voice on the phone during a conference call. (Note: This is not an advertisement for “you must work in the office” policies.) Let’s say you’re working on three concurrent projects, each of which has twenty people involved, either directly or as stakeholders. That’s sixty people right there, and that doesn’t count all of the people you’ve met on previous projects.

A number of years ago, a friend posted a link to a study which posited that the average person can only hold between one hundred and three hundred names in memory at a time. And if a new name enters the brain, a previously remembered name leaves to make room! Yikes, that explains a lot. The point of the study was to reassure people that They Are Not Alone in this situation. At least I hope that was the point.

But there’s another point... as the leader of Lean Six Sigma projects, or when plenty of other Positions of Leadership... you need to find tips and tricks to be able to call up the names of people that you’ve worked with. “I don’t remember” is funny the first couple of times, but it really strains credibility after that. So use your problem-solving skills to figure this one out if you need to.

Back to my example: During the embarrassing call with the supervisor, I quickly opened the calendar invite for the problem solving session in question. That way I at least had all of the names in front of me, which usually helped. More generally, when I could I recorded something resembling meeting notes, which is not at all easy when you’re also facilitating, and is downright impossible when you’re up in front of a room facilitating. My downfall on this is that I can often remember something that was said more distinctly than who said it.

Fortunately, it’s also true that remembering names pre-dates not only the Internet Age, but the Computer Age… hey, it probably goes back to before the Bronze Age. There are a large number of ideas, suggestions, and “hacks” for handling this “once and for all”—or so claim these publications, both online and in print.