I see the same person in almost every organisation I visit.
Let's call him Greg.
Greg is the only person who knows the specific sequence required to process a refund in the legacy system. He is the only one who understands the workaround for that tricky compliance checklist. He showed a colleague how to do it six months ago, but they forgot. Or they left the company.
So, requests pile up on Greg's desk.
When Greg goes to lunch, the team enters a holding pattern. If Greg takes a sick day, the department misses its targets.
It is inefficient, fragile, and completely preventable.
Organisations rely far too heavily on Tacit Knowledge. The unwritten information locked firmly inside Greg's head.
Right now, executive teams are scrambling to implement artificial intelligence to plug productivity gaps and drive automation. But AI has a major limitation: it cannot access Tacit Knowledge. It cannot scrape Greg's brain while he eats a sandwich.
AI relies entirely on Explicit Knowledge. It requires processes to be clearly written down, recorded, structured, and central.
When you leave essential processes trapped in one person's head, you don’t just create operational bottlenecks; you create systemic risk.
If you want to build a knowledge advantage, you must extract individual expertise and convert it into shared organisational resources.
Doing this requires people to make a shift from relying on tacit knowledge. People need to think, do others rely on what I know, if yes, then turn that knowledge into explicit knowledge. Document those core processes in a clean, searchable knowledge repository so every team member can access that current knowledge when needed.
Extracting expert knowledge stops your team from repeating expensive mistakes because they weren’t able to ask the right person. It allows new staff to feel confident they have access to everything they need to know from day one.
If you want to start mapping what knowledge you need, to determine what knowledge you have and what you need to create you can grab the template in the Free Changing with Confidence Mini Course.
If you want to learn more about how provide explicit knowledge for your people, then grab Changing with Confidence or book a call with Adrian.
