It seems everyone has a mobile phone with a camera in it these days. And digital cameras are as common as blades of grass on a footy field (it is nearly grand final day!). With all this pixel grabbing capability we should start using it to pictorially document our projects. Why? Because when you look back over a project, racking your brains to remember what actually happened, pictures help us recollect the project stories.

Remember the last time you sat down to flick through a photo album and see the photo of Uncle Johnnie (substitute your own relatives here) building the sand castle with little Katie and you instantly recollect the story of how Johnnie got incredibility drunk that night and fell into the bonfire. The next morning he vowed to be a tea totaller. The same story recollecting effect can be created in your organisation with each each project you undertake.

So what do you do with all the images? One thought is to start loading them on Flickr or an equivalent service in-house. Some organisations are already avid image snappers. UrbisJHD, for example, is an urban planning consultancy. They’re always snapping digital images to support planning proposals and new urban designs. As an offshoot of having plenty of digital cameras around they also take plenty of photos of company events. These photos can be a treasure trove of memory joggers.

So if you have the job of finding stories in an organisation, start by asking whether they have a photo archive. If they don’t, suggest they start building one. If nothing else it will be fun.