When to Document
Organizations leak knowledge - it’s the nature of organizations. A
person learn’s something through some experience. They store that
knowledge so that the next time something similar happens, they can
apply that knowledge to create a new, hopefully better, experience. The
human brain is pretty good at that. But what about organizations? In
this scenario, person A has had this experience but no one else has the
benefit of the gained knowledge. So when person B runs into the same
situation, they effectively have to relearn that knowledge which takes
up time that could be better spent experiencing something that no one
else has yet to experience adding to the total organizational knowledge.
I call the loss of this potential knowledge a leak.
But, since we’re not the borg, we cannot share all of our experiences
all the time. So some level of inefficiency is both inevitable and
expected.