3 Keys to Letting Knowledge Fuel Your Organization

People generally like to accumulate power. Whether it is in the form of money, status, or knowledge, we like the feel of control this gives us in our lives.

Accumulating knowledge to gain power in the workplace can take several forms, most of them stemming from the desire to do a good job. It could be as simple as a technician who is the only one who knows how to use a machine. Or the person who has been at the organization the longest and knows who to go to for everything. It can also take more malicious forms such as the person close to the CEO who is always talking about the things they overhead to show they know more than their peers.

Any of these situations are detrimental to an organization. When knowledge is known by one person in an organization and isn’t known or can’t be easily found by another person in the organization, it means the organization is at risk. It isn’t moving as fast as it could be and it is more likely to make avoidable mistakes.

As an organization, your goal must be to democratize knowledge and remove it as a source of power. Though this can be a deeply rooted cultural shift, there are three steps any organization can take to help make it happen.

More, Larger Meetings

This advice flies in the face of almost every other piece of advice about meetings but hear me out. The book Team of Teams by General Stanley McCrystal tells the transformational story of the Joint Special Operations Task Force during the Iraq War in 2004. A key element of the transformation was a daily, 90-minute all-hands with thousands of attendees from across the globe.

If you have worked for a company of any size you are probably passing out right now because you have been to quarterly or monthly all-hands and they are too boring to breathe. Why would they hold so many meetings and waste so much time?

This is the surprising part. Having the meetings more often with so many people is exactly why it doesn’t waste time. 

All-hands meetings are usually held so infrequently that they don’t provide any relevant information. All the decisions were made in other meetings and any information being passed is completely out of date. To make the meetings more relevant, you must hold them more often, at a cadence that matches the pace of change for your organization. This allows you to consolidate dozens of smaller meetings into this one meeting. 

Having as many members of the organization as possible take part in these regular meetings is the best way to create a shared consciousness across the organization. Everyone has all of the relevant information to make decisions day to day, and anyone with critical information can bring it up in the meeting to share with the group.

A properly designed all-hands can not only ensure everyone has all the relevant information, it can also eliminate the need for dozens of other meetings.

Proper Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is something that every organization struggles with and it isn’t getting any easier. By knowledge management, I just mean your process for keeping track of all the documentation your organization creates. These could be company policies, standard operating procedures or lessons learned. There are a lot of strategies and tools to help with the struggle, but I have come to borrowing an engineering principle from Elon Musk and rephrasing it for this situation.

The best document is no document.

Unless you are a publishing company, nothing is gained by having your employees spend endless hours creating document after document. Your goal should be to create as few documents as possible while still keeping track of all the information in your organization. Here are two simple rules to help make that happen, again, borrowed from Elon and rephrased for this situation.

1. Every document has an owner
2. Every owner’s job is to get rid of their document

The most common problem with documentation is that it quickly gets out of date and forgotten. Tracking who owns each document and making them responsible for updating it is the best way to make sure it stays relevant. 

The second most common problem is the sheer amount of documentation and that much of it is a duplication of other documentation. For this reason, you should always be pushing to condense and combine existing documents so they are as easy to search through as possible.

Quality Onboarding

No matter how good your knowledge management practices, they won’t survive if you don’t teach them to people. This is where onboarding comes in.

I am old enough to remember a time where I was taught how to use the library. First, we were taught how to look up books in the filing system of little cards that would tell us the location of the book in the library. Then we had to be taught how the library was organized so we could follow the directions on the card to locate the actual book.

Thanks to Google, people are now trained to believe that if a simple word search doesn’t get them what they want, they assume the information doesn’t exist. Teaching people how knowledge is managed in your organization is critical to making sure that knowledge is used.

Fuel not fire

There is no way to change the fact that knowledge equals power and you should want people in your organization to seek out that power. But your goal is to create systems and processes to ensure that power fuels innovation and growth and doesn’t become a fire that can harm the organization.