Making Knowledge Work Discoverable and Transferable

We kicked off a “five-minute” Process Debt Podcast on a deceptively simple idea: knowledge work only scales when it’s discoverable and transferable. Not sexy. Not “AI will fix it.” Just the boring truth: if the work lives in one person’s head (or one person’s bookmarks bar), you’re renting progress, not owning it.

Here’s the friction we see every week. In consulting and in corporate, the machine rewards secrecy and scarcity—intentionally or not. The myth is: if you’re the one who knows, you’re the one who matters. The invoice grows, the slide count grows, and yet the capability doesn’t. You can pay a million dollars for a deck that is, technically, discoverable and transferable… in theory. In practice, the playbook rarely survives contact with the org chart.

Meanwhile, inside most companies, there’s that person. Super-technical, genuinely brilliant, wrote the VBA or Python glue that keeps orders flowing and audits quiet. Their comments? In another language. Their logic? In their head. Their calendar? Full. One field changes, a dependency shifts, and suddenly everyone rediscovers just how fragile the system really is.

Here’s the turn: what looks like heroism is often hidden process debt. We optimize for speed to first win and pay for speed to second win forever. The first time through, “just get it done” feels efficient. The second time through—new teammate, new handoff, new regulator—it’s slower, scarier, and more expensive because the work isn’t findable or teachable.

If you want knowledge to compound, give it a home. Not a person. Not a deck in someone’s Downloads folder. A home. A single, boring URL where the work lives on purpose. Glossary, how-to, inputs/outputs, owners. Enough to onboard a smart stranger without a tour guide.

Then make the work teachable. We use a simple habit loop:

• Prescriptive — Write the “how we do it here” version. Short, opinionated, linked.

• Ritual — Practice it on a cadence. Demo hour, brown bag, stand-up section. Reps turn documents into muscle memory.

• Report — Show the outcome. A screenshot, a metric, a short “what changed” note. If the ritual doesn’t produce a report, it’s theater.

Two macro trends make this urgent. First, the boomer exit wave—decades of tacit know-how leaving on Fridays at 5. Second, the financialization of decision-making—when the lens is only the next quarter, you postpone the heavy work that actually reduces risk. Discoverable and transferable work is the heavy work. It saves you from the single-point-of-failure engineer, the brittle spreadsheet, and the layoff roulette where no one can tell who actually made knowledge reusable.

Where to start this month:

1. Pick one critical flow (e.g., invoice exceptions, new-client onboarding). Name an owner and a home.

2. Write the shortest prescriptive guide possible to do it the “right” way—links > paragraphs.

3. Schedule a 20-minute ritual each week where a different person runs the process while others watch and ask questions.

4. Publish a simple report: “What changed? What broke? What did we learn to make it clearer next time?”

5. Delete the private bookmarks. If a link matters, it belongs in the home.

Expect pushback. People will say it’s slower. It is—once. The second time is faster. The tenth time is safer. And when your best person takes a vacation (or a better job), you won’t discover that “critical path” actually meant “only path.”

Process Debt Truth: If the next competent stranger can’t find it and learn it in an hour, you don’t have a process—you have a dependency.