The Hidden Expertise Challenge: Why Knowledge Transfer Breaks and How We Fix It

Every organisation has hidden expertise

The ways of working that make a team great—the knowledge locked inside people’s heads, the instincts developed over years—often drive success. But as teams scale, restructure, or experience turnover, this knowledge can become lost, diluted, or trapped.?

Why am I obsessed with this problem?

I’ve lived it—across Learning?and?development, fast-scaling tech teams, high-stakes crisis response, social impact, and even learning to teach something I thought I understood.

For the past five years, I’ve worked in Learning & Development, focusing on knowledge transfer, onboarding, and enterprise systems training in high-stakes environments.

• I’ve designed onboarding programmes and enterprise training systems.
• I’ve developed standalone L&D products that should have worked—but didn’t because they lacked the relational and co-creation elements needed for real adoption.
• I’ve watched the L&D sector shift rapidly, with both excitement and intrigue, as it converges with change management, business performance, and AI-driven learning models.

Expertise Isn’t Just Taught—It’s Built and Refined

Yet so often, the knowledge that makes businesses thrive is implicit, instinctive, and inherited—yet invisible when it matters most.

High performance is unlocked and maintained when a team can surface the?innate, intrinsic, and intangible expertise?that fuels its success. Capturing what’s indispensable and integrating it into daily work makes it actionable, so knowledge is embedded, not lost.

Scaling Fast Means Knowledge Loss

When I was?Head of Client Services in a fast-growing legal tech team, I saw these challenges unfold?in real time.

• We were in?our moment—incredible talent, huge opportunities, and fast-moving decisions—but?the knowledge transfer question was critical.
• Our team included highly technical specialists who were brilliant in their fields but also needed to navigate client pitching, stakeholder management, business finance, and internal operations—all while keeping up with rapid growth.
• Part of my role was to capture and scale the expertise inside the team, ensuring that our best ways of working didn’t stay trapped in individual minds.

But this wasn’t the first time I’d tackled this challenge.

Crisis Response: When Knowledge Transfer Is Critical

• In August 2011, during the London riots, I stood up and deployed the Strategic Briefing Cell inside the Metropolitan Police Specialist Operations Room—ensuring that, every two hours, fully verified, provenance-checked operational updates reached Number 10, COBRA, London’s business sector, and senior policing stakeholders.
• In the first UK lockdown, I built a knowledge-sharing rhythm for the integrated retirement and care sector to ensure that frontline providers had real-time, deployable expertise. I believe this saved lives—our network had less than a 1% COVID death rate in the first wave while care homes were devasted.
• In the?charity sector, I’ve worked both nationally and hyper-locally, from?leading national operations for a refugee sponsorship programme?to serving as a?trustee in a small, volunteer-led charity with no permanent staff.

Then, I Became a Swimming Teacher

Flip-flops, a whistle, and the ability to keep saying "kick, kick, kick" helped me start answering a question I’ve been pondering for two decades:?How can we truly bottle the secret sauce of high-performing teams? Why is this question more urgent than ever? Could there be a manual for this challenge?

There is actually a manual for swimming teaching, and it provides the?baseline—the standard operating procedures, the key techniques, and the fundamental safety protocols. However, I quickly realised that you could?follow everything in the manual and still not be a very good swimming teacher.

Because so much of the expertise isn’t written down.

• How do you step into the perspective of a four-year-old who has never been in a swimming pool before?
• How do you adapt your approach in the moment when a child carries a deep, generational fear of water?
• How do you convey the feel of floating, when it’s something they’ve never experienced before?

There’s no checklist for that. No static documentation that can truly capture the nuance, intuition, and human expertise that separates competence from mastery.

That’s when it all clicked.

I had spent my career designing?systems to capture and transfer expertise, but?this was the rawest form of knowledge transfer I had ever encountered. This led me to create the Ignis Framework.

From Hidden Expertise to Scalable Impact

I created the?Ignis Framework?by combining all of these experiences into a method—starting with?what matters, searching for evidence of what drives success, and scaling it across an organisation's fabric.

Because in?every sector, every business, and every organisation, there is knowledge that is?crucial but incredibly hard to document, train, or scale. Whether it’s:

• A legal tech specialist who is brilliant in their field but also has to manage clients, sales, and internal operations in a scaling business.
• A police commander making split-second crisis decisions.
• A frontline care worker ensuring critical guidance is shared and acted on in real time.
• A charity leader navigating deeply relational partnerships.
• An AI-enabled team learning how to interact with intelligent systems.
• Or a swimming teacher helping a child lift their feet off the bottom of the teaching pool for the first time.

How It Works

We start with the business or impact metric that matters, uncover the 10 high-value insights that drive success, and embed them into 80 structured, repeatable knowledge assets—inside the workflows your teams already use. No extra platforms, no more wasted time reinventing best practices.

Why Now?

We are in a new era of knowledge transfer.

• The old human-to-human model is breaking under scale and turnover.
• The human-to-documentation model is too slow and too static.
• The human-to-AI model is promising, but it needs human expertise at its core.
• Unless you're working completely alone, knowledge execution is always shaped by teams, relationships, and human interactions.

The future is human-to-documentation-to-AI-to-human—but only if we capture and embed the right expertise at the right time.

What’s Next?

Where do you see hidden expertise in your organisation—things that only a handful of people know, that make everything run smoothly, but aren't captured anywhere? How do you ensure that knowledge doesn’t disappear when they do?