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The Scaling Paradox: institutional knowledge preservation starts before growth threatens excellence.

Every growing organisation faces this. The question is whether you see it before it's too late.

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Key person dependency risk

Where You Feel It Most

Different roles, different blind spots. All equally dangerous.

You're invisible to the problem until it's visible.

Tacit knowledge management

Why Traditional Solutions Don't Work

Every solution attacks the wrong problem. Here's why they all fall short.

Documentation Tools

The Promise: “Write it all down”
The Reality: “Documents become graveyards”
  • Knowledge ages faster than updates can keep up
  • Writing takes discipline nobody has
  • Search doesn’t match how people actually think
  • 500 documents, no standards, no consistency

Process Tools

The Promise: “Track everything”
The Reality: “Checklist bureaucracy”
  • Tracks what happened, not why
  • Over-structuring kills flexibility — teams work around it
  • Context lost in fields and timestamps
  • Archived boards reveal nothing about decision logic

Knowledge Bases

The Promise: “Single source of truth”
The Reality: “High maintenance, info dies”
  • If everyone owns it, nobody owns it — content goes stale
  • Wikis only capture what makes it to writing
  • Maintenance becomes a full-time job nobody wants
  • You miss 80% of actual institutional knowledge

AI Search

The Promise: “AI will find it”
The Reality: “Garbage in, polished garbage out”
  • AI can’t fix scattered, fragmented, outdated knowledge
  • No source attribution — can’t verify answers
  • Creates false confidence from plausible hallucinations
  • Doesn’t solve capture — assumes docs already exist

The problem isn't search. The problem is capture.

Traditional solutions assume knowledge is documented. But institutional knowledge lives in conversations, decisions, workarounds, and people's heads. Capturing it requires a fundamentally different approach.

Knowledge Loss · Employee Turnover

What's Your Silence Costing You?

Numbers you need to know.

0
of workplace knowledge is tacit
It's undocumented — living in people's heads, habits, and experience. When they leave, it leaves with them.
Nonaka & Takeuchi, The Knowledge-Creating Company, 1995
0
of workers can't find the information they need
Nearly half your team wastes time searching for answers that exist somewhere in the organisation — just not where they can reach them.
Gartner, 2023
0
of annual salary to replace a senior leader
That's not a typo. Replacing an executive costs more than double their salary — mostly in lost institutional knowledge and momentum.
Center for American Progress
0
of organisations have already lost critical knowledge
Not a future risk — it's already happened. Most companies have experienced irreversible knowledge loss from departures.
Panopto Workplace Knowledge & Productivity Report

Institutional knowledge preservation

There Is a Better Way

The organisations that preserve institutional knowledge don't do it through discipline and documentation. They do it by building systems that capture knowledge where it naturally lives: in decisions, conversations, and the reasoning behind process.

That's what Memory Overlays do.

Explore How Memory Overlays Work →

Not a sales call

Find where your organisation is bleeding knowledge.

20 minutes. No preparation needed. You'll leave knowing exactly where your biggest knowledge risks are — and how to fix them.

Limited to 5 assessments per month

  • Map of your top 3 knowledge risk areas
  • Specific recommendations to fix them
  • Cost of inaction
Book your assessment