Everyone agrees that knowledge sharing is important. But very few companies do it well.
The 20 Percent Club
This HBR article calls it out: only 20% of organizations have successfully scaled knowledge sharing across teams and locations. The rest? They’re stuck with siloed teams, outdated documents, and lost time.
The problem isn’t that people don’t want to share what they know. It’s that they don’t have a system to do it well.
Sharing Like a Product Team
The best companies treat knowledge sharing like product development. They:
- Build feedback loops
- Test and iterate content formats
- Create templates, scripts, and workflows
- Assign ownership and accountability
- Use storytelling and context—not just files
It’s structured, not ad hoc. And it works.
Surface Insights, Not Just Info
One of the biggest traps in knowledge sharing is mistaking “stored” knowledge for “usable” knowledge. It’s not enough to upload a PDF or drop a link. Knowledge only has value when it’s accessible,
understandable, and actionable.Encourage people to share what they learned, not just what they did. Turn project debriefs into playbooks. Turn mistakes into case studies. Turn experience into reusable insight.
Culture Over Tools
You can have the best knowledge platform in the world, but if the culture doesn’t reward contribution, it won’t matter. Make it normal to document learnings. Celebrate those who teach others. Make access to knowledge a key metric.
Because the faster your people can access what others have already figured out, the faster your company moves.