What defines a company? Not money, not people, offices, product nor cooperation.
I argue that it is organizational knowledge. By that I define as unique learnings collectively made as a team. These knowledge include mistakes, culture, strategies, tactics, technologies that are not available outside the organization.
For a company/organization to endure, it has no choice but to develop a way for preserving knowledge that can survive transition of people, time and space.
People who don't learn from history's mistakes are doomed to repeat it. We take it for granted that something learned will be passed down. But it's not true, intellectual dark matter exist.
Given that a organization's history is unique and can't be learned anywhere else, it's no one else but their own responsibility to preserve these history.
In this series I attempt to answer these questions. How to capture organizational knowledge? Why would people bother to read them? How do most companies do knowledge management? Why most attempts are destined to fail?
What is org-knowledge
Let's briefly define what we mean by organizational knowledge.
Hard knowledge is straightforward. How do this, where to do that, what has happened, SOPs, etc. Straight up facts.
The soft knowledge however are trickier. Why a decision was made, design rationale, policy choices, approaches picked, approaches abandoned, secret sauces, sales strategies, proprietary sales techniques, etc.
All these are results of team effort applicable only to the org's domain. If they can be derived from outside the org, they do not belong in this category.
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