Understanding and Preserving Institutional Knowledge in Your Organization

Organizations are made up of many moving pieces—products, processes, people—but what connects them all is knowledge.

Each organization has its own unique arrangement of knowledge that makes everything work. Unfortunately, that knowledge structure is surprisingly fragile. It’s easier than most leaders think to lose important information that helps their team function at its best.

In this blog, we’ll distinguish the different types of institutional knowledge and explore what you can start doing now to prevent it from slipping through the cracks.

Types of Institutional Knowledge

Technical or Explicit Knowledge

Organizations are required to document certain aspects of institutional knowledge, like information gathered for legal or compliance purposes.

There are other aspects of institutional knowledge that most teams understand the value of preserving—for example, functional details about networks, code structures, databases, and other related structures.

While it’s important to document these things (and document them effectively!), when we talk about teams unintentionally losing institutional knowledge, it’s usually not this type.

Business or Implicit Knowledge

Implicit knowledge is harder to capture—it refers to everything behind the concrete details. For example, when important decisions are made about how processes are established or projects are executed, how did you come to that conclusion? Why wasn’t another alternative chosen? Was another method attempted and failed?

This is the kind of knowledge you gain primarily through experience, and it’s often the kind that gets lost the larger a team grows or the more turnover there is in an organization.

Why Does Institutional Knowledge Get Lost?

Organizations are built on knowledge, but in many cases, shockingly little of that knowledge is accessible to the larger team.

Priorities shift, teams change, and suddenly, information that was once held in one person’s memory is lost forever.

The departure of key team members can easily cause confusion, inefficiency, and delays. But why does it happen? If this is such a common problem, why is important information not preserved before it’s really needed?

It Doesn’t Produce Immediate Results

While there are plenty of benefits to documenting and preserving institutional knowledge, it often gets overlooked in favor of initiatives that produce immediate results.

A common attitude toward documentation is “it would be nice to have, but it’s not helping me get my deliverables out the door now, and that’s what I’m being evaluated on.”

As a leader in your organization, it’s important to build a culture that encourages sharing of institutional knowledge. If leadership doesn’t value taking time to document processes, structures, and decision-making steps, then the rest of the team likely won’t spend their time on it, either.

Plus, documentation will actually help your team deliver results faster in the long term—everyone wins!

Not Sharing Can Provide a Sense of Security

In some cases, highly knowledgeable team members don’t feel motivated to document their knowledge because they feel it would make them replaceable. After all, if everything you knew was written down somewhere, couldn’t anyone do your job?

This is another reason it’s important for knowledge-preserving initiatives to start at the top. Building a culture of trust where team members feel respected and valued can go a long way toward breaking down some of the barriers to preserving institutional knowledge.

“The Answers Are in the Code”

Many technical teams feel like documentation is a redundant and unnecessary task. Why do you need technical documentation when you can look to the code itself to find your answers?

Of course, this doesn’t always work because code can be messy—and even well-written code only captures the “what,” not the “why.” Why was it written the way that it was?

Using the code base as documentation also doesn’t help with communicating important details to people who don’t have the same level of expertise or access to the code base. Without proper documentation, time still needs to be spent explaining concepts to those stakeholders.

Preserving Institutional Knowledge in Your Organization

What can you do to address the challenges of preserving institutional knowledge in your own organization?

Create Mentorship Programs

Encouraging collaboration between long-term and newer team members can have a major impact in transferring and preserving institutional knowledge—especially the implicit knowledge that comes primarily from experience. 

Establish SOPs

When you do a task every day, you don’t think of it as valuable knowledge because it becomes so mundane. However, when you aren’t there to do it, it will become very clear to your teammates just how important that information is. Creating standard operating procedures for key tasks can make the transition smoother in the event of a departure or emergency.

Build a Culture of Transparency

As we mentioned while exploring the reasons institutional knowledge gets lost, preserving knowledge starts at the top. Creating a culture of knowledge sharing across your organization means leaders also need to share their own knowledge with teammates both more and less experienced.

Take Your Knowledge Management Practices to the Next Level

Learn more about the value of knowledge in your organization and how to make it work for you with these additional resources:

• Understanding Knowledge Management
• 3 Types of Documentation Developers Need
• How Confluence Documentation Supports Your Team

Explore More Resources