Organisations store knowledge in routines, documents, roles, layouts and culture rather than in individuals, which is why they can retain what no current employee knows.
Walsh and Ungson distinguished several retention sites, including individuals, culture, transformations, structures, ecology and external archives. The consequence is that knowledge survives departures unevenly: what is embedded in a routine persists, what lived in one person's head leaves with them, and nobody can tell which is which until the person goes.
In practice
- A process nobody can explain still works, because the explanation is distributed across the form, the layout and the order of steps.
- A firm that moves offices loses practices that turn out to have depended on who sat near whom.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline