Why is knowledge management so hard? Of the three places I’ve worked so far, none of figured out a way to keep docs up to date. Probably because each KM instigator assumes that the space’s maintenance will happen automatically. But humans are lazy! If something doesn’t need to be done, then why spend the effort?

It’s only when someone in the team suddenly needs a little bit of info that can’t be found does the team suddenly say, “why didn’t we write any of this down?”.

It’s the typical disaster-memory scenario. We plod along as if we were indestructible, when inevitably some disaster happens and we ask ourselves how we could ever be so careless. We immediately spend lots of money/effort preparing ourselves for when we next experience a similar terrible event.

The only thing is that disastrous events also tend to be very rare. Inevitably, the impact of the previous calamity wears off, and we forget why it was such a big deal in the first place. The cost gradually outweighs the perceived benefit and we fall out of the habits we once thought were fundamental.

So how to proceed? We know it’s important to write things down, but we don’t want to put in the effort of maintaining them and keeping them organised.

The first change of perspective is to stop thinking that documents need to be kept up to date in the first place. Embrace the fact that a doc is a snapshot of our thoughts at a particular time and focus instead on creating a system that allows us to create, store and retrieve them.

Should a particular document keep coming up as relevant, at that point it can be brought forward and highlighted among the rest. Naturally, the most used docs will stay towards the top of the pile, and the oldest ones will eventually sink down out of sight.