Fixing the Chronically Leaky Pipes of Organizational Knowledge Flow

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I love this quote from Jim's latest newsletter because it drives home the criticality of ensuring people have accurate information throughout an organization. Decisions hinge on a blend of factual knowledge, insight, instinct, and, more often than anyone would like to admit, assumption. Every employee’s decision impacts your organization’s success—but how many of those decisions are backed by solid knowledge?

You've probably been there yourself. As a front-line employee you may have paused, ready to decide on a customer request, and searched for guidance. The answer should have been clear. You knew it was probably somewhere in an email, or you could check with your manager, but she was in a meeting. So in that moment, you made your best guess only to find out later that you guessed... poorly.

Why do employees so often lack the information they need? Why do CEOs so often assume they know what's going down in the employee's world?
The pipes that keep organizational information flowing leak badly. Sometimes:

• The questions are never asked, so the information goes unshared.

• The answer was given but wasn’t clear—or was misunderstood.

• It was clear but forgotten, with no record to refer back to.

• It was recorded but tucked away in a personal notebook that left with a former employee.

• It was recorded in a shared file that was never updated, leaving outdated answers in its place.
  And so on. Clarity leaks away, leading to missed insights, misalignment, redundant questions, and decisions based on half-truths or guesswork.

This is the problem underlying Jim's work to bring visual work management to teams, and why we're such fierce advocates for Way of Working Team agreements. These strategies ensure the questions get asked, the answers get documented and regularly refined by many eyes, breaking the cycle.

Things get a bit trickier at the organization level, though. As they grow, companies develop multiple teams, departments, and hierarchies full of information. Each employee is only informed about a tiny fraction of the sum total. The CEO doesn't know what the front-line folks know, and vice versa.

The Problem with Traditional Ways of Sharing Organizational Information

To bridge these knowledge chasms, companies host Town Halls, internal webinars, and all kinds of events designed to share information and answer questions.

The number one complaint about these events? People don't ask many questions.

Why not? Some of it is poor meeting design, but I think Steven Sloman, a cognitive scientist at Brown University, is keyed into a more fundamental challenge.

I sat next to Steven at a conference this month, where we compared notes on how to best help groups think together. When it comes to ensuring employees have accurate information, one of the greatest challenges is what he calls the "knowledge illusion."
In the book he co-authored with Philip Fernbach, he states:

In other words, when we know that someone in our network knows a thing, we come to believe that we know it too. We act as if we have all the "facts" without questioning whether our assumptions are correct or our sources knowledgable in their own right.

In the public sphere, should we become aware of our knowledge deficit, we can seek out the missing information. Want to know how a toilet works? Google it! Want the more nuanced and full story behind the latest bit of outrage bait? Check a broader suite of news sources. We live in an information-abundant age. The hive thrives.

But if our ‘hive minds’ make us smarter, why do so many employees feel uninformed?
Often it's because their company hive only dribbles out information in a Town Hall, and they weren't really listening.

The Rise of Dynamic Company Guidebooks

Early adopters of hybrid and remote work realized that, while their remote employees could easily look up the latest TikTok influencer strategies, they often lacked an easy way to look up their company's latest strategy. In those environments, relying on people rather than documentation for every answer forces folks to meet all the time. For remote companies especially, documenting critical information where every employee can easily find it is a must.

But this raises a host of age-old documentation dilemmas.

What should we document? Who documents what? Where do we put documents? Where can we find the documentation we already have? What if it's out of date? What if we disagree with what's written? What if people ignore it? You know they will, so what's the point?

Organizational documentation has long been a source of frustration and debate. On one end of the spectrum, we have companies drowning in their bureaucratic soup, with bloated shelves of moldering documentation overflowing backrooms or putrefying in SharePoint repos. On the other end, we have the enthusiasts' quest for agile "people over process" purity that derides documentation but takes it too far, leading to confusion, inconsistency between teams, and a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth.

The key is to strike the right balance between structure and spontaneity. Too much rigidity, and you suck the life out of the experience. Too little, and you end up with a messy free-for-all, like toddlers with noodles set loose in white halls. Teams are craving a balanced approach—one that provides clarity and consistency without stifling creativity or flexibility. 

Pioneering remote-first companies found a better balance by ditching dead-tree binders (and the many layers of formal approval behind their creation) and embracing dynamic online guidebooks. Each company’s living online guidebook looks and operates a bit differently, but they all seek to embrace these ideals:

1. SSoT: Single Source of Truth. There’s one true, current copy of each guideline, available at a reliable URL.

2. Easy, anywhere access. Employees can easily access the guidelines anytime, anywhere In some cases, companies make their documentation transparent by default, and publicly accessible to anyone on the internet. (See GitLab’s Handbook for an example.)

3. Active tending by many gardeners. Documentation is regularly seeded, developed, weeded, and pruned. In some companies, anyone can suggest changes, which are incorporated into the guidelines after a brief review. Just like anyone can contribute to Wikipedia or Wikitree, documentation improvements come from many sources, with a smaller crew of master gardeners on hand to correct errors, untangle confusions, and clear out last season's detritus.

4. Heavy, regular use. Unlike the new hire packet that most people skim once then never open again, teams don't have a chance to forget about these guidebooks. In email, chat messages, and meetings, team members consistently point back to the guidebook for answers.

In the next few articles, we’re going to explore how these living resources make it easier for organizations to navigate the complexities of collaboration.  This rounds out our investigation into the documents that support effective collaboration, which started at the individual level with Personal User Manuals and Quickstart Guides, then explored the team Ways of Working document, and now moves up to the organizational Living Guidebook.

A Peek at What’s to Come

Chris Butler's fascination with the employee handbook of the future inspired him to catalog and analyze the best of the best. We'll draw on his insights, favorite examples, and what he's learned about the key ingredients to making these resources effective.

We'll also talk with Laurel Farrer, an expert on setting up new guidebooks. She’ll walk us through the process as if she were consulting with an established company seeking to turn their dusty binders into a living guidebook.

Finally, we'll wrap up with thoughts about how to keep the life in living documents and share test-case scenarios to think through as you create your own documentation strategy.

But before we dive in, let's take a moment to acknowledge the valid reasons why organizations abandoned traditional documentation in the first place. The expense, the maintenance challenge, the inflexibility, the way they can go rancid faster than milk in the sun—these are all legitimate concerns. And yet, as we'll see, the dynamic guidebook has the potential to overcome them.

Moving from static documentation to dynamic, accessible guidebooks can bridge knowledge gaps and support smarter, more cohesive collaboration. These living documents foster clarity and adaptability, giving every team member access to a single source of truth.

What strategies have you seen work best? Are the teams you work with achieving a healthy balance between structure and adaptability, or do information gaps still get in the way? Share your insights, strategies, or challenges in the comments below.

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