While there are technical solutions to every knowledge related problem - like wiki, chat bots, AI-assisted search engines - the culture of working with these tools seems lacking sometimes. A lot of them are focused around saving and retrieving information, but creating knowledge wisdom is dependent on the goodwill of a few individuals. AFAIK there are no tools that are contain mechanisms to encourage their use at the appropriate time. Even rarer are organizational efforts to derive wisdom for all from the knowledge gathered and created by some.

Knowledge and Wisdom in your Team Link to heading

Let’s clarify the terms knowledge and wisdom here. There are existing definitions like the DIKW framework, but not without controversy.

As far as this article is concerned, I will go with the intuitive definition of: “Knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” Or to describe it a little less flippantly: Wisdom is knowledge with added context, not only grasping how a technology works, but also when and where to apply it.

So, while there are definitely technical solutions for knowledge management, it is mostly still seen as an opportunity to consume bits of information that are arranged and grouped for ease of use. The obligation to obtain this organized knowledge lies with an individual in present need for a piece of information or a solution to their problem. (Spoiler: They will turn to Google/Stack Overflow first, before consulting the internal knowledge management system.)

Wisdom Distribution, on the other hand, is a process driven by intent to make everyone involved smarter by delivering knowledge, additionally shaped and curated through the lens of experience and multiple perspectives. The obligation to provide and shape the pool of immediately available knowledge lies with the sender, which is normally the organizational unit working on similar topics or facing similar challenges, i.e. your department or the team.

So, how do we re-motivate the majority of the team to participate in knowledge and wisdom management and how do we make the gaps in wisdom visible and patchable? As a stretch goal, finding a way to inspire people to look beyond what is immediately on their plate and find creative solutions to problems would be nice as well.

For developer focused teams there are rituals like code reviews with let knowledge permeate between some team members. But how can we make sharing of knowledge and maybe even wisdom creation an integrated part of our work culture, especially in cross-functional teams, where not everyone is a developer?

Let us try to create a framework to enable a team of up to a dozen people to engage in knowledge sharing!

Regular meetings for Sharing Experiences and newly gained Knowledge Link to heading

Have regular meetings about once a month, where you discuss recent challenges in the team, interesting new articles (like the one you are currently reading), recent solutions and failures, etc.

The responsibility to organize the meeting should rotate between team members. They do not need to prepare all the content, but they create the schedule and collect presentations and contents. They also ensure proper execution, such as the availability of a (virtual) meeting room and all the other necessary tools, like whiteboards. This way, you don’t fatigue individual team members and everyone gets the opportunity to put their topics of interest on the agenda. They also make sure that any materials created for the meeting are then saved in the correct repository or network folders.

During those meeting no daily business topics should be focus of the discussion. It’s not about “how will we solve a current issue”, it’s more about “how did we solve an issue”.

The meeting takes place if there are at least two participants, if there are people not being able to attend, no matter how important/overpaid they are, tough luck. Try again next time. Since these meetings are by their nature never urgent, but in my experience very important, they tend to be the first on the chopping block when there are urgent, but not important matters popping up.

The agendas of the meetings should be searchable in plain text (again in a repository or a wiki entry) and not tucked away in some PowerPoint slide, so that it is easy to find a topic again that you just faintly remember.

Don’t shy away from esoteric topics or such that are just barely adjacent to your comfort zone or daily theater of operation, as they tend to generate discussions or foster innovation.

Use those meeting to do exercises like a a bus factor check or discuss larger changes to your mode of co-operation.

At least once a year have an in-depth view at your project documentation where you rigorously weed out or update obsolete content. Decide upon or re-evaluate the framework of content organization ( start with documentation quadrants) and decide upon the templates you want to use within that framework.

Curated List of Ideas Link to heading

Have a central list (Google Spreadsheet, plain text file in a repo) that everyone can access. Team members fill the list with ideas they want to discuss, relatively free form. These ideas can be:

  • interesting blog posts,
  • fundamental questions that have been bugging them,
  • solutions to recent challenges,
  • failures to find a solution and the avenues explored on the way or
  • simply trending topics.

It is everyone’s responsibility to check for duplicates before they add a new entry to the list. Curate the list together in the monthly meetings like the refinement activity in a SCRUM process or let the senior team members handle the curation. Don’t be too strict on the immediate usefulness of a piece of content but make sure there is actually substance behind each topic:

  • Don’t: “Let’s discuss generative AI”
  • Do: “There is a discussion regarding the impact of genAI on our business. These are the top 3 ideas: … Do we agree with this assessment?”

This is also an opportunity to let people create something outside of the daily toil and take ownership of topics they are interested in. (I basically go by: whoever feels something is important or interesting enough is allowed to prepare and present the topic).

If you are worried about this process being to unguided and too much nonsense entering that list, let a senior team member compile a list of interesting newsletters and make picking content from these newsletters for the list a team effort.

Removing Obstacles Link to heading

The importance vs. urgency issue and general reluctance to re-visit issues you just solved for reasons of documentation and discussion makes the consistent execution of knowledge sharing or wisdom distribution activities very difficult, so let’s remove some of the obstacles that hinder people from participating in the process:

Create a checklist for the organizational part of the meeting, so the organizer doesn’t have to think through all the steps necessary for a successful meeting.

In order to prevent decision fatigue, reduce friction and ensure quick and easy creation of materials create templates for:

  • the agenda
  • the actual presentations
  • wiki pages
  • wiki structure

If your teammates are comfortable with some advanced tech, prepare a pandoc template (or just show how this works in your first meeting).

I found that focusing on plain text or markdown files to present knowledge has the added benefit of easier transfer of especially helpful text passages into a formal wiki/documentation, removing another obstacle of re-formatting a Word or PowerPoint file.

Make documentation part of the acceptance criteria of each ticket and link the documentation content in the ticket. That increases visibility of work, improves estimation of story points during refinements and increases the perceived value of documentation work.

Final thoughts Link to heading

The points above combine facets of brain storming, ritualized documentation, coaching and practice of presentation skills.

For added fun and benefit to your team’s presentation and communication skills, try to present the content in a secondary language (if everybody participating is capable of understanding this language, of course). You can also gamify the knowledge and wisdom sharing activities by handing out trophies to the top-contributor of the year to the knowledge base.

Free and easy access to knowledge and wisdom and the act of motivating people to gain this knowledge should be natural to every good employer/ boss / leadership personality. It’s a win for everyone involved.