Institutional knowledge loss can take many forms, but one of its most common instances occurs when long-standing leaders and experts decide to step down and leave the organization. Departures arise as individuals look for new opportunities, retire, or as a result of organizational restructuring and downsizing. Regardless of the circumstance, the impact of these departures is predictable: individuals take their hard-earned knowledge with them. Lessons learned through years of experience within the organization, their know-how, and relationships forged from interacting with vendors, clients, and other stakeholders within and external to the organization are lost. For remaining staff, work becomes harder; and for remaining leaders, there is a loss in efficiency that impacts the bottomline. 

This, however, is not the full extent of the impact of their departure. Operational efficiency and continuity are at stake. When organizations fail to capture and transfer seasoned leaders’ knowledge and expertise throughout their tenure, it becomes more difficult for up-and-coming employees to step up to fill in gaps when an individual decides to retire or leave the organization. In leadership positions, this problem is exacerbated when new leaders lack the historical context of previous decisions and strategic efforts. All of this translates to increased risks in succession. 

 

An Interim Solution to Departing Executives

We recently had the opportunity to partner with a regulatory agency in modernizing one of their knowledge management programs. As part of this effort, we began with one of their most pressing concerns: several of their senior leaders were due to retire in the next few months. They had built their careers within the agency, establishing and leading some of its largest, most impactful projects and programs. Understandably, many of their colleagues were concerned that with their departure, the organization would lose critical institutional knowledge and the ability to effectively sustain and expand on the work that they had been performing. We held a series of knowledge transfer activities to capture prioritized institutional knowledge and maintain it within the organization. Knowledge was prioritized by consulting senior leaders’ peers, their direct reports, and previous collaborators, focusing on the types of questions that they would like answers to. From the sessions, our team synthesized responses and produced searchable knowledge reports that, for instance, detailed the process of establishing hiring and training procedures for critical staff in niche fields. 

After going through several rounds of this approach for knowledge capture, it becomes evident that manually conducting end-of-career interviews requires a great deal of time and effort from both KM teams and interviewees. 

 

Sustainable Solutions to Knowledge Loss

While targeted knowledge capture activities may work as an interim solution to resolve an immediate need, activities like knowledge transfer interviews at the time of departure are not a sustainable, long-term solution. If your organization waits until an employee’s imminent exit to capture their knowledge, it does so under less-than-ideal conditions. Interviewees may face difficulty recalling the details of work that may have transpired several years in the past. Furthermore, the process can be very resource-intensive: a KM specialist needs to plan and facilitate each session, and afterwards they then need to conduct follow-ups, and synthesize and prepare the knowledge for reuse.

Ideally, organizations will establish a repeatable and consistent process to capture relevant knowledge from their employees as part of regular business. These processes should be paired with established and emerging technologies to reduce the effort required from individual experts to capture and contribute their knowledge. 

Technology remains a critical tool for implementing and scaling knowledge capture and transfer processes to prevent organizations from losing institutional knowledge. Often, we can leverage tools that are already in use within the organization. In recent years, teams have increasingly adopted digital channels and tools to collaborate and communicate, enabling new opportunities to embed captured knowledge into existing processes, and generating data and content that can be used by AI. For example: 

1. Mining meeting data, communication exchanges, and document authorship to identify hidden networks and pockets of expertise. Once these ‘hidden’ networks have been identified, they could be supported into the formation of Communities of Practice (CoPs) to nurture and transfer their knowledge across the organization. Real-world Application: At an international organization, we developed a recommender system that connected individuals to experts, which was especially useful during their project planning phase, creating the opportunity to bring in institutional knowledge to project teams from the very beginning of an effort. By creating a community and spaces for their members to share their knowledge, organizations can help remove single points of failure in the future. 
2. Establishing standards to collect key artifacts at high value moments of content capture and make them findable. The artifacts should be structured and tagged with metadata representing business context. To the extent possible, organizations should go beyond saving files and documents, and creating semantically-rich content so that knowledge is more readily found and reused. Real-world Application: EK helped a federal R&D center standardize their metadata in their project document repository systems, and leveraged an auto-tagging routine to apply the metadata at a large scale. This approach significantly improved their ability to find and understand historical research documents, preventing their institutional knowledge from being lost. 
3. Leveraging emerging technologies such as Generative AI agents to expand and automate the efforts of KM teams. Real-world Application: Recently, a large financial institution EK works with had an incident where a critical legacy system failed. They struggled to reach the person or the knowledge to get the system back up and running in time because their primary expert was on vacation. This incident also illuminated a larger problem leadership was facing: many of their tenured experts and senior management were nearing retirement and planning on leaving the organization within the year. They needed to quickly stand up a knowledge capture process that could be repeated for all of these individuals. EK designed an AI-powered agent to conduct asynchronous interviews in order to collect and synthesize knowledge from the departing experts and managers. Similar to the manual approach previously described, EK worked with stakeholders to define the success criteria of the interviews, and these were passed along to the AI agent. The AI agent then opens up a chat with each departing individual, asking questions until the desired outcomes are met. Interviewees respond to the questions at any time, enabling participants to contribute their knowledge at the most convenient times for them. 

Organizations can, and should, apply different combinations of process improvements and technology to not only capture knowledge from leaders within the organization, but also effectively scale them throughout the organization. 

 

Closing

The ability to retain institutional knowledge from departing leaders is essential for organizations—essential for maintaining operational efficiency and continuity and enabling informed decision-making.

Minimizing the impacts of departing leaders requires longer term approaches to identify, capture, and preserve institutional knowledge. The approach will depend on a variety of factors, including the time availability of leaders, whether their direct successors have been identified, the existence of knowledge bases within the organization, and the organization’s knowledge transfer preferences. Ultimately, this may result in establishing formal mentorship programs, communities of practice, knowledge summits, or other KM solutions. It will be important that this knowledge, through whichever means it is captured, is also intentionally disseminated across the organization.

Enterprise Knowledge helps clients across the globe in defining knowledge management strategies and leveraging knowledge capture and transfer techniques to preserve their institutional knowledge. If your organization needs assistance in this area, you can reach us at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

Institutional knowledge is the sum of experiences, skills, and knowledge resources available to an organization’s employees. It includes the insights, best practices, know-how, know-why, and know-who that enable teams to perform. This knowledge is the life blood of work happening in modern organizations. However, not all organizations are capable of preserving, maintaining, and mobilizing their institutional knowledge—much to their detriment. This blog is one in a series of articles exploring the costs of lost institutional knowledge and different approaches to overcoming challenges faced by organizations in being able to mobilize their knowledge resources.