There is an interesting moment at the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home. Doctor Strange’s magic spell has erased Peter Parker from everyone’s conscious memory. Names, faces, relationships and shared experiences are gone.
In the latest, Spider-man: Brand New Day (spoiler alert!!) in the end, when Peter Parker meets his best friend Ned and starts their old, playful handshake, Ned instinctively completes it.
The science behind the moment
Psychology broadly distinguishes between declarative memory and procedural memory. Declarative memory is the conscious recall of facts and events—knowing that something is true or remembering what happened.
Procedural memory, on the other hand, is associated with learning skills and routines—knowing how to do something—and these behaviours can eventually be performed with little conscious effort.
Think about –
- Riding a bicycle
- Swimming
- Typing in passwords
- Playing a familiar piece of music.
When you first learn, every step requires attention. With repetition and practise, the sequence becomes increasingly simpler. You don’t consciously recall every individual movement before executing it; you simply do it.
Ned may no longer consciously remember who Peter is, but the familiar handshake provides a cue for a deeply practised sequence.
Repeated behaviour can become deeply ingrained and increasingly automatic.
And that idea applies surprisingly well to how companies scale.
When the founder is the company’s memory
In the early days of a startup, this usually isn’t a problem. There are a handful of people, the founder has direct oversight, and everyone knows what is happening.
The founder :
- knows which payment needs approval,
- when a filing is due,
- where a particular contract is stored and
- what needs to happen when something goes wrong.
The organisation works because a significant amount of its institutional knowledge is sitting inside a few people’s heads.
Recently, during the due diligence process undertaken for a Pre-Series B round of a company, several gaps across accounting, bookkeeping and compliance were uncovered.
When we shared with the findings with the founders, the response was familiar:
in the early days, everything had been simple and under direct oversight.
As the company scaled, the focus moved. There were no robust SOPs, processes lived in people’s heads, and when key employees left, parts of the process effectively left with them.
Here, clearly, the issue was that the organisation had not converted individual knowledge into institutional systems.
This is where we believe founders need to think differently.
- An SOP sitting in the system is useful, but having an SOP is not the same as having a functioning process.
- A checklist tells them what needs to be checked.
- A template tells them how something should be done.
And resilience comes when these tools are used consistently enough that the underlying behaviour becomes part of the organisation’s normal rhythm.
In other words, companies need to move from declarative knowledge—”I know what the policy says”—towards procedural execution—”this is simply how we do things here.”
The distinction matters enormously during periods of stress.
When everything is going well, people have time to remember, look things up and ask questions.
When the company is growing rapidly-
- a key employee leaves,
- a regulatory deadline approaches, or
- an investor begins due diligence, people tend to fall back on familiar routines.
That is precisely when processes that exist only on paper are most likely to break down.
Auxano Lens : Building Organisational Muscle Memory
At Auxano, we believe the answer is not more documentation for the sake of documentation. The answer is repeatable systems that become embedded through consistent execution.
SOPs, checklists and templates should become part of the way work is actually done—not documents that are opened once during onboarding and forgotten afterwards.
The Practical path
The same principle applies to friction. If following a process requires ten unnecessary steps, people will eventually find a shortcut, particularly when they are under pressure. The compliant path should therefore also be the practical path. Good systems make the right behaviour easier to repeat. Discipline & checklist – the elementary !
Repetition matters
You don’t build organisational muscle memory through a frantic compliance exercise once a year. You build it through consistent execution—daily, weekly and monthly—until the process becomes familiar enough that people don’t have to stop and reinvent it each time.
The real test of a system
The real test of an organisation’s processes isn’t whether they work when everything is normal.
It is what happens when the founder is distracted by a fundraise or when an investor starts due diligence and suddenly asks for years of historical records.
That is when you discover whether you have a process or merely a person who knows the process.
At Auxano, we believe resilient companies are built by decoupling critical processes from individual personalities and embedding them into the organisation itself.
The objective is to create an organisation where the right things happen consistently, even when people change, circumstances change and pressure increases.
If you are heading into a fundraise and are not sure whether your compliance runs on paper or on muscle memory, that’s usually where we start.
Author,
Mansi Handa
