The richness of the mental indexing is an important determinant of the effectiveness of later prediction and understanding. Shank has argued that human intelligence uses concrete 'cases' rather than abstract 'rules' to access memory. Concrete cases are richer in information than abstract rules and can be applied to a wider range of new circumstances. The conversation goes on from there. In organizations, people swap stories about past events related to current ones, such as other mergers, previous downsizings, previous system upgrades, etc.
Discussions are exercises in collective sense-making.
Members of an organization use specific events to develop and refine understanding of the organizational environment. Though our minds internally store and access richly encoded memories and then use those to predict and make sense of new situations, our conscious problem-solving is often impoverished in the detail that it utilizes. In problem solving, humans tend to give relatively little attention to actually identifying and formulating the problem. For example, generating requirements for new technology is a notoriously difficult task, and requirements generated often do not adequately capture the need. Several recent approaches to planning new technologies attempt to get around this difficulty by eliciting rich information about the current problems and needs before attempting to imagine solutions.