Knowledge Black Holes: Where Your Company's Information Goes to Die
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Make Others Successful, a podcast where we share insights, stories, and strategies to help you build a better workplace. My name is Mitch. If we haven't had a chance to meet, I have Mike here and Matt, kind of the regulars. We're gonna be talking about knowledge management today.
Mitch:Doesn't sound
Matt:super exciting,
Mitch:but it's really important. So this is like the vegetables that you have to eat on your plate that we are gonna feed to you. So pretend they're, like, loaded up with butter and a little bit of, like, chili flakes, and it's gonna be really,
Matt:really Some garlic.
Mike:I feel like we need to be honest and let the audience know that Mitch doesn't eat vegetables.
Mitch:I can we can do one covered with oil and chili flake.
Matt:Mitch's statement is he eats the things that eat those things.
Mitch:That's very true. I do. Almost exclusively. Anyway, back on topic. We are going to be talking about this because it's something that we see a gap in in the marketplace.
Mitch:It's something that often feels like a secondhand thought. It it feels like something where people build businesses off of good people, and then they figure out that they have a process, and then they integrate process, and then they fail to bring it bring that knowledge back into the business to feed into that system. And it's I don't I don't know if this is just something that lingers all the time or if people sort of figure it out. A lot of the people we talk to haven't quite figured it out yet. So this is sort of in line with some of the stuff that we teach in our course.
Mitch:If if you haven't, taken that yet, a lot of it is organizational knowledge and we talk about that. But we're gonna be talking about the Kathy at your organization. We're gonna start off this way. First, do you guys have any Cathys at your old jobs where Kathy knew everything, knew everyone? She was the person that you sent everybody to when there was a question, and she seemed to always have, like, one step ahead on knowing what was coming at the company.
Mike:Yes. His name was Matt. I
Matt:knew this is where this was gonna go. Yeah. Hi. I'm Kathy.
Mitch:Yeah. Yeah. It's good good for you to self recognize.
Matt:Yeah. I mean, there were definitely people at organizations, but yeah.
Mitch:But you it's you. Yes. Okay. Glad we got that out there. So the the thing that we want us to think about is when Matt, when Kathy is out of the office or when she gets a new job or someone else has to get hired and get upskilled in those things, it can get really painful because that person has a ton of the knowledge in their brain that they have to just audibly tell somebody or they have to take their time to write it down and it's something that takes a lot of effort.
Matt:Thus, take that one step even further and say that most of the time, those people are well connected and highly performing and just knowledgeable in general about what's going on.
Mitch:You're speaking of yourself?
Matt:I'm trying not to.
Mike:Mean, I was I would echo I'm uncomfortable with this this statement. Those people are the high value folks or the people who are getting stuff done. They know all the stuff. They've applied themselves in all of the different ways. Mhmm.
Mike:And so there, you you can't live without them. You need those people.
Matt:Yep. Well, but at at the same time, having someone go to that person for all of those things isn't a good thing to start with.
Mitch:Yeah.
Matt:And then when they do leave, you're not gonna hire somebody even if you hire someone also that is the same way, it's gonna take time for that person to become more like that. Right? It's not a very sustainable model. Right? Right.
Matt:You want to enable those people to be super effective and they aren't necessarily the most effective at being the library, the dictionary,
Mitch:the Yeah. They're just bogged down all day with random questions.
Matt:A lot of times we get when we talk to customers, HR departments, huge, huge in this regard. They're the people that know all the things about all the stuff. You got managers, employers, employees, like everybody is going to them with these same questions. But it's it can be every area of an organization can have the same kind of thing.
Mitch:Yeah. And so we have this graphic where we're illustrating the fact that businesses build around build their knowledge around people, and they have core people who then disseminate, share information with someone else, who then that person can share it with someone else, and it creates this web of reliance on this core structure.
Matt:Without technology, that is Yeah. That is it.
Mitch:Yeah. That's how it goes. And so with the brighter, better future that we're trying to articulate is with technology, you can pull some of that out of relying on someone's brain and instead build your organization's brain. So you want to talk a little bit about that of like how does someone start to think about where this problem exists?
Matt:There's a couple different symptoms, because I think that's really what you're asking about is what's some symptoms that are that that you could look out for. And one is exactly what we've been talking about. Like, if your opera if you when you talk to people in your organization and you go, where do you get questions answered if if the response is, I go to Kathy, I go to Mark, I go to Siobhan, right? Like, that's a person. That's where I go.
Matt:Or even worse, or not even worse, but one level better, I go to HR, I go to whatever, right? And when they're saying those things, they still mean a person. They still mean I go to this thing and I submit a request. Right? They have a number that I call for IT and that's where I go to get these things.
Matt:You're definitely in this world where your information is locked behind people. Even if even if you contact Siobhan and she's going and looking at a repository, like a knowledge base of information, it's still like no one else can get to it but this person, and you have to go through this person. That's one symptom. And the other symptom is people attempt to use something like a technology, like SharePoint or like maybe you have an Intranet, maybe you have Copilot, maybe you have an AI to Claude, right? But you get 17 versions, or when you're trying to find something, you're finding seven, eight, nine, ten versions or you're finding one that is for this group and one that's from this group.
Matt:That's another symptom of this problem. Right? Where people are trying to use technology, but only in their own little tiny, either individually, like the HR person put it in their OneDrive and then shared it with everybody else so they don't have to keep doing this all the time. That's not great. That's not what you should be doing.
Mitch:Well, more most of the time they're emailing out the document.
Matt:Emailing is another big one. Yes. That's another another big one is email. Like, everybody's emailing attachments all around. That's another example.
Mitch:Can you think of any other places you've seen this show up in the past?
Matt:Symptoms? We
Mitch:we call them knowledge black holes, actually in our course too. We're we're labeling those as the place where knowledge goes to die. It's it's where something is going into someone's brain rather than something that the organization owns.
Matt:Can utilize.
Mike:I mean, in our world where we're building software and things like that, a lot of that stuff gets lost in the developer's workstation, right? If they don't have the tools and systems to document what they're building or they don't document it at all, that, like, building software, writing code, building processes, like all that kind of stuff is is plagued by it. And, you know, like, you started the question with, like, well, we have technology and so we can solve the problem. Like, wanna, like, stress that for so long we've had technology and the problem gets worse.
Mitch:Yeah. Sure.
Mike:And which is key to what we talk about when we talk about mindset and approach. It's not just, oh, I've got Office three sixty five now, I can solve this problem. Look, SharePoint, problem solved. It's not that at all. Like you have to have the right mindset and approach And then you have to apply that across the board.
Mike:Otherwise you don't get great, great results. What you just said is one of
Matt:the things that led to this podcast episode, and that is many times when we react to features and components within technology, and we are saying we don't like it, some people can view that as us being frustrated with the technology specifically. Like, we hate OneNote. OneNote was the big one that we were talking about before we started
Mike:to How dare you.
Matt:To talk about this and how we hate hate OneNote. The reason we hate OneNote is because it is a proliferation of these these pockets of information. It's not necessarily just like, yes, there's features that we don't like. There's little things, but one of the core reasons we don't like it, and one of the core problems we have with some of the Teams stuff and some of the SharePoint stuff, it's a worldview that says it's really important to promote and help people organize in a different way. And just like you're saying, SharePoint as a tool doesn't fix it.
Matt:Are there features that you could build into SharePoint where it would help promote this mindset? 100%. That would be great. But most tools don't do that because that's not what they're They're trying to sell licenses to people and people work a certain way and they are It's not natural to work Many the
Mike:of those tools have been around for years now. And when they first came to market, they were focused on the individual. Yeah. On personal.
Matt:Because that's what's gonna sell.
Mike:Right. On on making people productive in their personal work or whatever they're doing and less about being strategic for the organization.
Matt:Yeah. A 100%. A 100%.
Mitch:So if we want to just jump ahead to the answer, what you need to do is build a culture that builds this organizational knowledge. Yep. So, here's your answer. Done. It was good talking to you guys today.
Mitch:We'll see you next time. There's a lot that goes into it. And and like Mike said, the tools that we have in our toolbox can further that problem. Like, the tools themselves are built in a way that can push you one way or the other, but it is totally not obvious which one is which. People don't realize how things are stored or what is meant to work one way versus the other that makes it obvious to say, oh yeah, this builds my organizational storage.
Mitch:This builds the knowledge of our organization. So I think the first question I would pose to you as you are thinking about this problem is if I had to hand my work to someone tomorrow or someone else needed to do my job, how quickly would they be able to do that? And for most people, it is six months. And I I'm not trying to make this a people are exchangeable interchangeable sort of thing at all. It's a we want to lean towards being able to have people in the know and be able to use the knowledge of the organization rather it be instead of it being lost in someone's I
Matt:would change the statement a little bit to be more about not so much about when can they be effective in their job, because I think a lot goes into that. How quickly could you hand off all of the knowledge, the source knowledge, not what's locked in my brain necessarily. And maybe there's two parts. One is how quickly could you pass off all of the contextual knowledge to the next person? So that is file sharing, forwarding email address, emails, etcetera.
Matt:And then the second is what's the delta between that and the context that you only have in your brain? And the answers to these questions should be less than a couple hours to hand off the data and I don't even have to do it. Somebody else can do it because they have access to the same stuff that I do. And there should only be a small amount of context that is yours, truly yours. Because the truth is, when you're working at an organization, that everything you're doing is owned by the organization.
Matt:Right? Like, that's what it should be. It's their role, it's their job, it's their thing. And just like you said, that's not an attempt to try to make it easy for someone to be replaced. That's not what it's about.
Matt:Because quite frankly, it will be way easier for you to do work because you will have access to everyone else's knowledge that you currently don't have access to.
Mitch:Mhmm.
Matt:It's it's not that simple. It's it's It's separating the role from who you are. And in so many cases, like what we were talking about earlier, that's going to be so empowering to people. People who aren't allowed to be in the room for some meetings, for good reason, legitimate reasons, now we'll have that information and they can now level up what they're doing for the business.
Mike:Mhmm.
Matt:And people who want to take a vacation but feel like every time I do, nothing gets done. Mhmm. But why why is that?
Mitch:Well It's like when you leave.
Matt:So ridiculous.
Mike:There's two things that came to my mind when I was listening to you guys talk about that. One is the risk during onboarding. Like, you don't have a good strategy figured out for this and you bring people on board and they're frustrated because they're trying to unlock doors and they can't figure it out and like, how many months do you go feeling ineffective before you just move on, quit, go to another job? And then the second thing is, without having a good strategy for this, how much power you're actually putting in the hands of individuals for the success of your organization. Yeah.
Mike:You're literally like leaving it up to someone else. And so as an owner or a leader, you wanna take that back. You wanna eliminate those types of roadblocks, right? So that the organization can move forward, not just an individual.
Matt:That last thing you the first thing you said, I think was a symptom that I didn't call out that I think is a good one. If you look at every new hire as a drain, as being, oh my goodness, it's gonna take them they won't know anything about anything. And I I have to be the one to help them. And I have to we have to spend seven weeks on intensive training with them, giving them the context, not teaching them about the process, but giving them the context of a project. And I can't even They can't be effective at all, right?
Matt:Because they don't have any of the information. That's a huge sign, red flag, right? Like, you should be able to add somebody to a team and be like, I've got the context. They can go off on their own, learn about what's going on, come up to speed, and come back to the team and provide value relatively quickly.
Mitch:Yeah. I thought of, as you guys were discussing, I thought of one other way that we can pose this question that we want people to ask themselves is when they're doing something at work, saving a document, for example, they need to ask themselves, does this exist beyond me? Yeah. And it's tricky to know that answer, which we could talk about in a second. But I think that is the important thing, is that it needs to exist beyond you.
Mitch:I forgot what I was gonna say next. So Matt, please fill in two minutes for me.
Mike:Know, what would have been good is if whatever he was gonna say was like in some sort of organization knowledge repository.
Matt:Well, okay. So this is the thing. Mike, this is the thing. Like, there's a lot of areas within organizations and actually what your group here does a lot of is build systems that help track this type of data. But it's data that is well formed.
Matt:It's data that is process controlled and structured, right? Where organizations get into trouble is with everything else, right? Like the stuff that we're talking about, like Salesforce, CRMs, process management tools that are built, they're doing this primarily, right? Like they're trying to capture all of this data and contain it. But what we're talking about, which we're not suggesting those are bad or don't do those, like that's great.
Matt:Where we see the problem is tools like email. I think email is a number one on the list of problematic technologies. Email, OneDrive, personal storage on your local machine, like a hard drive, anything like that. I think that's it's an interesting thing to think about because it's not like technology hasn't been helping people to do that. In the past, that has been a specialized thing.
Matt:It's a I'm going to build this tool, I'm going to build this system to capture this piece of this thing and shove it into something well formed. And what we're saying is you can do it with everything. Like, you don't have to you don't have to do all of that. Like, yes, that's great. And yes, we do that all the time and we help people do that, but that's you don't have that's you're not stuck with only that.
Mitch:And I think that well formed posture, that that that framing is is actually helpful in thinking about the order in which people work. And because when people first start something, a rough draft of something, they often view it as this is my my first rough draft. So I'm gonna go in my word on my computer and type this thing up. And then over time, it'll get important enough where they might say, oh, can you review this for me? And they'll send a link in their OneDrive to somebody and then they'll say, oh, that looks great.
Mitch:Let's share that with Randy. I've shared with Randy. All of a sudden, that is the source of truth for that thing and it never got promoted from this is my document to this is our document. Yeah. And so the paradigm that we want to eliminate is there's no start out not
Matt:as mine.
Mitch:Yes. Yeah. The only thing that should be yours is private notes like that nobody should see. That's something that doesn't matter to anybody else. Otherwise, you should go into your teams, find the appropriate place, click even if it's called rough draft, like if you're scared of creating a rough draft in front of somebody, you got something else going on.
Matt:The organization has another thing. That's like you're you just brought up another thing, another symptom of a prob of part of a problem that's stopping you from getting there. If your organization, no one is allowed to have a work in progress, that's a that's a problem. Mhmm. You're gonna be, you're gonna ever forever be plagued with this mindset of I have to hide that away because otherwise I'm going get yelled at because it's not good enough.
Matt:That's not a good place to start at all. And you're a 100% right. Like we talk to people all the time about switching their mindset from saying, in our meetings, we have lots of things. We have Critics, PowerPoint, we have No one in our organization creates those things in their OneDrive. We create them in the space where it needs to be, and then that's where it lives forever.
Matt:There's no there's no, I created it in OneDrive and I sent it to Mike and he reviewed it and then, like, that's a sign to all of us. We're missing something. We need to create a space. Why do we not know where that should go? What what space are we missing to make this good?
Mike:Mhmm. It was interesting. Once upon a time, the collaboration tools or toolset in Microsoft three sixty '5 didn't have Teams. So six years ago, Teams wasn't really Yeah. On the scene yet, wasn't being used heavily.
Mike:It was SharePoint. So if you're gonna do any sort of collaboration, document sharing, version control, that kind of stuff, you're you had to do it in SharePoint. Yep. And there's at that point in time, there's all kinds of like roadblocks to doing that. It's like, oh, I need to request a new site for this thing that I'm doing, right?
Mike:So either you had everything jammed in one big site for the whole organization, which was horrible, or you just couldn't do it, so then you were forced into the OneDrive scenario. So it created a bad option. And the thing that I just thought of was like, how interesting is it that when Teams first showed up on the scene, there was zero governance. In fact, Microsoft made it so that anyone
Matt:Anyone could create anything.
Mike:Could create a team Yeah. Anytime they wanted without any sort of approval. And we all looked at that and went, holy crap. But I wonder if somebody said, you know what, Teams is gonna be the way in to better organizational knowledge management.
Matt:I mean, I think so.
Mike:And they didn't they didn't prescribe Yeah. The solution, they just put it out there and let it happen.
Matt:That's a very interesting conversation because
Mitch:An optimistic hunch. Well, no.
Matt:Like, I I believe that that is part of it. Truthfully, I do. What I think they failed, and I've said this to them a bajillion times, That does not respect the state of the world even today. And it's been ten years since people have been trying to change the way people work, like, even longer. Like, people have been trying to make this happen for a very long time.
Matt:People, it's not natural to them, and the tools weren't super great. Like, we back when Teams first first first came out, the web browsing, the web editing experience, and the co authoring, and the It wasn't the it wasn't the same. It wasn't as nice it is as it is today. Right? You can say they were ahead of the times.
Matt:I would tell you they needed to implement what 90% of customers have done, which is to put an approval process. Like, let people request it, but put a little button that somebody has to say okay. Because the problem, the reason why, just to be really clear with everybody, the reason why we ourselves don't allow people to create teams is because this concept of understanding the knowledge landscape at your organization needs to be curated. Letting people create 50 teams
Mitch:Yeah.
Matt:For the same purpose doesn't help. It makes it
Mike:worse. Think there's I think there's a calculation there that somebody did because if they had put gates in place at launch, every organization would have locked it down
Matt:and nobody I mean, most organizations.
Mike:And nobody would have used it and we'd all be using Slack.
Mitch:It it just reminds me of a
Matt:We love it.
Mitch:A potential customer that I was talking to at one point in time. If I've told this story before, I'm sorry. But he said, hey, Mitch, we I need help with team strategy and architecture. I have like 46
Matt:teams that
Mitch:I need to I don't know if I need to get rid of some or like how I should be thinking about this stuff. And so I said, okay, well, you tell me more about your organization. How many people are involved? And he said, oh, it's just me. And I was like, yeah.
Mitch:He needed his own approval process to create Teams, which is a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. Be it's it needs to be curated. Otherwise, it can get out of control a little bit.
Mitch:And then it creates the like gut reaction from IT of, oh, let's just close this down and not let anybody do anything because that's easier than figuring out our process. So
Matt:real problem with that, the reason that that becomes a problem that IT gets looked at is that ownership of that costs. Like, there is some effort that needs to be put in place there. And most places, IT maybe understands it, but doesn't know how to communicate it with everybody else. Sometimes some of the business areas know, but it's not enough of the business areas to really come up with a real Yeah. And that's part of the problem is like understanding your knowledge management at almost any organization is pretty critical, but very few organizations are either at a size or a maturity where they're like, I'm gonna spend time on this.
Matt:I'm gonna make sure this is fixed. And so you end up in a situation where only during buyouts, only during leadership changes, only during like certain events does it really bubble up and become like, oh, we need to fix this. This is a problem.
Mitch:Yeah. Okay. Let's give people a two minute crash course on how to how to make this better. Okay? Step one, identify your Kathy's.
Mitch:Ours is Matt Dressel. Step two, identify any other black holes, Knowledge Black Holes at your organization. Step three. Go ahead, Matt Dressel. Give them the real answer.
Matt:So once you've figured out what those are, you need to designate a place for that knowledge to go. And even if it's not perfect to start with, even if it's not the best place to start, you need to designate a place. For us, there's really a framework, when you think about those places that we think is right for pretty much every organization. And that is to have an intranet for things where you wanna communicate, to have Teams and SharePoint sites that is where any sort of collaboration, any sort of, you know, I'm working on this document at ad hoc with someone that really belongs in Teams. And then on the other end, there's community things.
Matt:There's this engagement with organizations where it's just like, I have quick questions, quick answers. I wanna build that knowledge base very similar to what we talked about before, where you've got Siobhan, and then you've got a knowledge base that she's using. Bring that public. Use using Viva Engage, using something else like a community that will allow you to do that. So that's the framework that we have found works for organizations.
Matt:Not all organizations need all those things all the time. Not all those organizations have all those problems right now. And maybe the Internet is the focus on some and Teams is the focus on others, like, it it varies, but that framework is a great starting point for people. And stop emailing. Stop direct
Mitch:No internal emails.
Matt:Direct direct chatting. Email is a personal tool.
Mitch:K. Okay.
Matt:A personal and external, to be clear.
Mitch:Yes. Yes. Only use it for external communications. Doesn't AI just fix all of this? Let's learn let's wrap up with our favorite topic.
Matt:Our favorite
Mitch:topic, Can't I just have AI fix this for me?
Matt:Nope. AI doesn't AI is actually way worse in this world.
Mike:The the AI tools will only ever work as well as your knowledge is organized.
Matt:Organized and permissioned. Yeah. Yep. Like, you may organize all the knowledge you want in your OneDrive and that will work for you, but nobody else can get to it. Right.
Matt:And in many cases, if you have duplicate copies, if you've got different people with different access, it can actually hurt you way more than it helps you. You now have a situation where somebody is relying on information that is out of date or is not right or, you know, whatever. So it can be a significant challenge. It's it's and to be clear, that's why a ton of Microsoft's work around Copilot has been in identifying this problem. Oversharing, undersharing, like outdated content, like that's been a big push from them.
Matt:But obviously, just like we were talking about earlier, that's a hard pill to swallow. People are like, I just want the I just want the easy fix. And that's The meat.
Mitch:Yeah. The steak and potatoes.
Matt:And sometimes you gotta slip some asparagus and green beans into it. I am actually hungry. Yes.
Mitch:Let's go find some food. Thanks everybody for listening today. It was great chatting. This is something, like I said, we talk quite a bit more in-depth or more structured formulaic in our course. If you wanna check that out, that's $3.65 foundations.
Mitch:We'll leave a link somewhere around wherever you're listening or watching this. But until next time, thanks and we'll talk again soon.
Mike:Thanks, guys.
Mitch:Hey. Thanks for tuning in to Make Others Successful. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear from you. There's a couple ways you can do that. One, we'd love for you to rate our show on your favorite podcasting app.
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