I feel like we've done this before, but I can't find it.
Past work can't be found
The organization has done this before, and that work exists somewhere in its systems. Nobody can find it, so the team starts from scratch.
- Teams redo work that was finished months ago.
- Searching the shared drive or wiki turns up the wrong things.
- Long-serving people act as the index: you find past work by asking them.
Who: someone who joined in the last year. Ask: "What did you build from scratch that you later found had already been done?" Count: in the last quarter, how many pieces of work repeated something done before. You're probably looking at this pattern if earlier work existed and nobody could find it. Probably not if people found it but didn't trust it or couldn't use it. If not, compare it with The reasoning never gets written down.
Knowledge stuck behind team lines. In that pattern, the work is live on another team right now. In this pattern, it's finished work sitting in an archive.
Pick the process that would break if one person vanished, and write it down well enough for someone else to run.
For your next big decision, list the three or four kinds of knowledge it depends on, and write a name next to each.
Know-how fades when it goes unused and leaves when people do, which shows up in research on learning curves and knowledge decay led by Linda Argote. Established. Shared databases tend to keep the explicit part of past work and lose the reasoning. Observation.