The Timing Problem
By the time an organization recognizes the risk of knowledge loss, it’s often too late to capture what matters most.
This post is part 2 in the BRIDGE framework series: Begin Early, Record, Involve, Document, Give Ownership, and Evaluate. Using interviews and recent research, it is a framework designed to capture tacit expertise and safeguard vital professional and organizational memory.
We are starting with Begin Early, which is inspired by this real example:
Julie spent 32 years as the sole librarian in her firm. During that time, the information service adapted to changing technologies, research practices, and working environments. Continuity was carried forward through experience, judgment, and familiarity built up over decades.
As retirement approached, it became clearer how much of that knowledge lived in everyday practice rather than in records. This is typical of stable, well-run services, where long-standing information managers accumulate knowledge and become invaluable subject experts.
Begin Early focuses on a question of timing rather than outcomes. That is to say, while context is shared, relationships are active, and organizations still have choices about how continuity is supported.
A Professional Blind Spot: Valuing Our Own Knowledge
This timing problem is rooted in a deeper professional habit, articulated clearly by one interviewee:
“I am not sure that we are taking our own knowledge collection seriously enough. It starts with valuing our own profession compared to other professions and practicing knowledge management for ourselves.”
Across the interviews, information professionals are consistently described as central to how organizations function. They are trusted and relied upon to keep services running smoothly through change.
What receives less attention is the professional knowledge that makes this possible. While considerable effort is invested in managing external information—systems, resources, repositories, and user guidance—the internal knowledge required to sustain those services is often carried implicitly rather than formally expressed.
This creates a paradox. Information professionals are highly skilled at building structures for other people’s knowledge, yet their own expertise is frequently embedded in habit, experience, and judgment. Practices such as reference interviews—answering a question with a question—are understood as craft, not as organizational assets.
When knowledge is held this way, continuity is maintained through presence rather than design. Over time, expertise becomes inseparable from the individual, and early signals of concentration and dependency are easy to miss—not because they are concealed, but because they feel entirely normal.
Beginning Early: Noticing Where Knowledge Has Settled
Begin Early is not about preparing for an exit. It is about noticing when knowledge has become concentrated, long before any transition is planned.
Services continue to function well, so knowledge risk is rarely associated with everyday work. Over time, this sense of stability masks how much continuity depends on particular individuals being present.
Departure brings that dependency into focus, but it does not create it. Long-standing roles naturally accumulate context, shortcuts, and ways of working that are rarely articulated because they do not need to be. Expertise settles into practice rather than being separated out for inspection.
The signals of this concentration are familiar. One person becomes the default source of answers. Productivity dips when they are absent. Tasks are performed slightly differently depending on who is present. These variations are rarely disruptive enough to prompt concern. They are absorbed into routine and described as “just how things work.”
Trust plays a central role here. Highly experienced professionals are relied upon to keep things moving, so their methods go unquestioned. Expertise becomes automated and largely invisible—even to the person carrying it. Continuity is maintained through presence rather than design.
Reframed this way, continuity is not a future event but an ongoing condition. The question shifts from who is leaving to where knowledge has settled. When attention moves in this direction, organizations gain the chance to support continuity while experience is still active, shared, and evolving.
What Organizations Already Have (But Activate Too Late)
This pattern is not caused by a lack of systems. Most organizations already possess infrastructure that could support continuity if used differently.
Digital repositories, knowledge management systems like Presto, intranets, handbooks, and integrated library systems like SydneyDigital are commonplace. They exist long before any knowledge “nosedive” occurs. Yet in day-to-day operations, these tools are typically used transactionally rather than relationally.
Documentation focuses on how to perform tasks, not why they evolved in particular ways. Systems are optimized to manage information for users, not to preserve professional reasoning for successors. Intranets become static libraries or forgotten folders. Archives capture history, not lived practice.
It is only when a departure becomes imminent that these systems are used for knowledge capture. Handover notes are requested in the final weeks. Exit interviews with HR attempt to compress decades of experience into a 30-minute Teams meeting. Training and shadowing are squeezed into timelines that are insufficient.
The result is documentation without currency or context. New hires describe inherited files as “interesting, although not particularly relevant.” Procedures have morphed over time, but manuals have not kept pace. Even robust systems are missing the most critical heuristics because those were never externalized while the expert was still embedded in daily work.
What Begin Early Actually Means
Begin Early represents a shift in professional awareness.
When people reflect on what “early” would have meant in hindsight, they consistently describe years, not months. Successful transitions resemble a gradual slope rather than a cliff edge, allowing space for evolution, adjustment, and shared ownership of knowledge.
Beginning early also means recognizing that expertise is often unconscious. Extracting insights cannot be left to a rushed final week because the expert themselves may not know what to say under pressure. Knowledge needs to be surfaced while it is still part of routine conversation and decision-making.
Most importantly, beginning early requires valuing professional knowledge enough to manage it deliberately. When information professionals apply the same discipline to their own work that they apply to external collections—capturing not just outputs but reasoning—continuity becomes an ongoing condition rather than a crisis response.
Where Next: The Limits of Late Capture
This is only the beginning. Begin Early does not solve the problem of knowledge continuity; it creates the conditions under which it can be addressed. By noticing where knowledge has settled while experience is still active and shared, organizations gain time. They also gain choice and perspective.
What it does not do is make tacit knowledge easy to extract or fully transferable. Even with documentation, there are forms of knowledge that are difficult to reconstruct once someone has left: shortcuts, educated guesses, and the reasoning behind why systems are configured the way they are. The “why” that turns history into relevance.
Late-stage capture struggles precisely because so much of this knowledge is social, contextual, and embedded in practice. Successors are forced to reinvent solutions their predecessors had already mastered.
The next post in the BRIDGE series, Recording What Matters, will explore this boundary directly—examining how context, reasoning, and meaning can be surfaced while they are still alive, shared, and accessible. Not as an act of preservation, but as a way of keeping institutional memory usable for those who come next.
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