Did you know that if NASA was going to launch a rocket or a probe to the moon they could not do it today because the knowledge is in expert’s heads and has never been spread to everyone and it hasn’t been documented, it hasn’t been written down anywhere and the knowledge is gone so they couldn’t send someone to the moon. If this can affect NASA, which has the brightest brains from around the world, think of what it can do to your organization.
I had a company that was a major food seller in Canada, I can’t say their name, they had a health and safety program that was in the heads of two managers and these managers were siloed. They didn’t share their expertise, they kept it close to their chest because it gave them in their mind a competitive advantage. When they left the organization was simply devastated because they had no health and safety program. It was very thin. It wasn’t documented. It wasn’t written. It wasn’t archived. There was no record of what these people had created and also what they had achieved amongst the people as well, getting buy-in, getting ownership. It was restricted to these two people and a new person would have to come in and create the relationships that had taken years to build.
What I bring to an organization is my knowledge to bear and if I see situations like this I bring it to the attention of senior management so they can act to mitigate this so that teams can be created each with their own areas of expertise, documentation can be filed and put in place to prevent this from happening.
It is rather like the term Gestalt where there is a sum yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, where many people acting together creates something extraordinary and save lives in the process.