Three Hypotheses on Collaboration, Hypothesis 1: Knowledge Evolves

Over the course of my career, I’ve developed three foundational hypotheses about unaddressed needs in collaboration:

1. Knowledge Evolves (this post)
2. Email Inboxes are the Intranet
3. Asynchronous Communication is Important and Broken

In this series, I will explore each of these hypotheses and some of their implications.

Hypothesis 1: Knowledge Evolves

The first and most fundamental thing I noticed about organizational knowledge is that it follows a common path.

note when they add tools

1. In the beginning, an individual knows something and demonstrates that knowledge.
2. Those recognizing that individual’s knowledge, ask them about it. The concept is thus refined, spread via conversation, and becomes tribal knowledge.
3. Someone gets frustrated with the inefficiency of having long conversations to access that knowledge. They codify the knowledge somewhere and point people there.
4. Subsequent requests, at least to that individual, are shared instead of sparking new conversations.
5. Sometimes the knowledge is so important, it becomes enshrined, critical to job performance, part of new employee onboarding, etc.

Cool, I’ve sold you on having an intranet.

But, wait a minute, you still have to ask that one person that one thing every time. And that one bozo still bugs you every time they have a question, no matter how much you put in the wiki. What the heck?

Well, observing and knowing something is easy. Conversation is also easy, there’s no barrier to sending an email or Slack message. Meanwhile, there’s social pressure and neuroscience around responding to requests, no matter how repetitive or asinine.

Anything beyond tribal knowledge is comparatively hard:

1. It involves a different tool/context. When the options are seconds in Slack/email vs. minutes crawling the intranet, users will default to conversation.
2. The intranet is a dump. Users have to trawl through a fugly UX, navigate information architecture designed by Hieronymus Bosch, and/or pray to the search gods to divine a phrase that is the exact name of the article.

Thus we see a massive yawning chasm between tribal and codified knowledge. Most knowledge will never make the leap.

Tribal Knowledge’s Mini-chasm

A smaller, but pernicious chasm exists within tribal knowledge:

One employee asks a question via realtime system (SMS, Slack, etc.) and gets responses back. More clarifying questions, more responses, participants realize that short form answers are inefficient for this question. What do they do?

Too often this turns into a meeting, the highest bandwidth communication mechanism we have. No notes are taken, so the knowledge doesn’t evolve and isn’t searchable later.

Email or commenting on a shared document would likely have been more effective, but, similar to our first chasm, there’s friction and fidelity loss moving from one to the other.

So What?

My hypothesis is that knowledge evolves and the lack of tooling to facilitate this evolution is a massive drag on “knowledge workers’” productivity. If economies lurch forward with gains in productivity, I argue that the inability to evolve knowledge is an impediment to economic growth.

There are companies working in this area. Most look like wikis that hang off of Slack (for now). They still have their own chasms to cross, but this work is important and I look forward to seeing it solved one day.

Read the rest of the series (linked as they’re posted):

1. Knowledge Evolves
2. Email Inboxes are the Intranet
3. Asynchronous Communication is Vital and Broken

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