Sasha has worked in the NFP sector for 30 years. For most of that time, she’s been employed by the same community organisation. Most co-workers can’t remember a time without Sasha, describing her as an “institution”, a “rock” and an “indispensable member of the team”.

Nobody wants to imagine a workplace without Sasha, but what would happen if, through unexpected circumstances, she suddenly had to leave?

For many NFP leaders and HR professionals, the optimistic answer might be, “We’d manage”. And perhaps they would. But people like Sasha often possess something that is both critically important to an organisation and extremely difficult to replace: organisational knowledge.

More than documented processes and policies, organisational knowledge encompasses everything from the judgement built through years of experience to deep and nuanced relationships with stakeholders – and so much in between.

It is often underestimated, sometimes taken for granted and in the worst cases ignored as an organisational asset. And if it isn’t given the thought and attention it deserves, when a person like Sasha unexpectedly exits, it can create significant organisational problems.

So, how can NFPs identify the knowledge they can’t afford to lose – and make sure it’s shared before the people who hold it move on? For the second article in our people risk management series, we spoke with Director of People and Culture at Anglicare Victoria, Gaye Crichton, to find out.

Why does organisational knowledge matter more at NFPs?

Organisational knowledge is vital to every organisation, but for several reasons it’s particularly important in the NFP sector. Crichton says chief among those is the need to stay on top of regulatory requirements.

“I think our challenge [in the NFP sector] is our regulatory environment, which is constantly changing,” she says. “We’ve probably seen more change in the last three years than we have in the last 15.”

She points to changes in child safety laws following the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Rather than being one big shift followed by minor adjustments, the changes have unfolded through a staged and often complex process of regulatory reform that continues to this day, intersecting with areas such as governance, insurance, privacy and volunteer management.

For organisations working with children, this is exactly the kind of evolving regulatory environment where retaining and sharing organisational knowledge becomes critical.

All NFPs, Crichton notes, have core obligations – to individuals, to groups and to the communities they serve. Failing to meet them because important information has been lost “puts the organisation or your people or your clients at risk”.

In other words, it’s not enough for someone in the organisation to know how something works. The organisation as a whole needs to know it too – particularly when that knowledge is critical to meeting its responsibilities.

How does organisational knowledge get lost?

There are several ways organisational knowledge can disappear, but it often comes down to two things: too much of it lives with too few people, and there aren’t processes in place to share it more widely.

Knowledge management is the practice of making sure the information and expertise an organisation relies on doesn’t walk out the door when its people do. That knowledge comes in different forms, and is often grouped into three categories:

Explicit: This is knowledge that’s already been put into words and which can be handed to someone else directly. In a work context it might take the form of a policy manual, a spreadsheet or a handover document.

Implicit: This is knowledge that could be made explicit, but which hasn’t been yet. If a staff member knows that a certain funder likes an acquittal report filled out in a particular way, but has never written it down, that would be implicit knowledge.

Tacit: This is knowledge that is difficult to put into words – often gained by years of experience. It’s closer to an intuitive understanding than a stated fact. For example, an experienced crisis phoneline operator being able to sense that a caller is in deeper distress than they’re letting on.

All employees possess organisational knowledge – and much of it is valuable to the organisation in some way. But people who have been with an organisation for many years often accumulate a deeper store, particularly of the implicit and tacit kind.

The problem with knowledge remaining implicit or tacit is that it can be difficult for anyone else to access or learn, so when a long-serving team member becomes unavailable, that knowledge effectively disappears with them.

Crichton calls this the TattsLotto Problem. She says the question to ask is: “If the person who owns [a certain piece of] knowledge won TattsLotto and was gone tomorrow, could we pick up what they do and do it without them? Do our policies, processes and systems make this easy?”

If the answer is “no” in your organisation, you have a significant risk that needs to be better managed.

Here are four ways NFP leaders can protect vital organisational knowledge from being lost when key people move on.

1. Identify important knowledge and who possesses it

Making a list of critical knowledge in your organisation, and who has access to it, is an important first step. Create a register so that all internal stakeholders can contribute, and can help decide what knowledge is really critical, and why. It may be that only one person even understands that the knowledge they have about a particular area is critical.

From there, look out for areas where important information or expertise is concentrated in one or two employees.

Crichton says an astute leader will literally listen for the warning signals – one of them being when the same person becomes the go-to for information or decisions across an organisation.

“You hear people saying: ‘I just need to talk to…’ ‘I just need to talk to…’. Those people become very well-known or need to be part of all the decision-making, whether the decision relates to their role or it doesn’t,” she explains. When the same person is repeatedly relied on in this way, it can be a sign that too much organisational knowledge is concentrated in one place.

“I think it’s a good thing for organisations to just step back and write on a piece of paper the half a dozen people – not roles, but people – who if they weren’t here tomorrow would cause us [the most] pain,” Crichton says.

2. Document and share knowledge throughout the organisation

Knowing who holds critical organisational knowledge is a good first step, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re able to share their knowledge through the organisation.

Sometimes that’s because they don’t realise how important the information is or that it’s held only by them. Sometimes it’s because the knowledge is too difficult to explain in straightforward ways. And sometimes it’s because they simply don’t have the skills to pass it on, or because there are few opportunities to do so – they may already be beyond 100% capacity.

Crichton says leaders can promote the sharing of vital knowledge by creating forums or frameworks for team members to discuss what they know.

“To give an example, we operate what we call Pillars of Practice,” she says. “They’re groups of senior practitioners in, for example, the family violence space or the residential care space. And they come together and they talk about practice.

“It’s people connecting regularly, talking about practice, sharing learnings and reflecting on what needs to change.”

Of course you need to make sure you’re not just adding this to an already overloaded employee’s responsibilities – overloading the most capable employees is one of the top three sources of burnout.

3. Facilitate incidental learning

Crichton’s example is what’s often referred to as a community of practice – a group of people with shared expertise who regularly come together to exchange knowledge. It’s effective because it’s formal and structured, with a clear purpose and a regular opportunity to learn from others.

But organisational knowledge can also be shared in ways that aren’t precisely organised.

According to Crichton, incidental learning – the transfer of knowledge that happens through casual conversations, observation and osmosis – is just as important as intentional learning in an organisation. But fostering it can be challenging, especially in a post-COVID work world where many employees are spending less time in the office than they were before 2020.

“I think that incidental learning needs to be thought about, especially when people have very hybrid flexible work,” she says. “It doesn’t mean [working from home] is right or wrong, but organisations need to think about where that learning happens.”

Meetings, she adds, can certainly be a place for knowledge sharing, but they’re more likely to generate “ah-ha moments” than the incidental learning that happens before and after them.

She points to the informal conversations that take place around an in-person meeting – the kind that are easily lost when the meeting is online. “Very few people hang around and chat before or after a Zoom or Teams meeting in the way they might if a meeting is held on-premises,” she says.

The solution isn’t to demand that all workers return to the office five days a week. Instead, consider prioritising meetings for days when more people are in an office together, maximising opportunities for incidental learning, and leaving remote-work days for less collaborative work.

4. Create opportunities to absorb tacit knowledge

In his 1966 book, The Tacit Dimension, the philosopher Michael Polanyi wrote, “We can know more than we can tell.” He used riding a bike as an example: although most people know how to do it, almost no one is able to explain exactly how they stay upright as they pedal.

This is the challenge of tacit knowledge – knowing how to do something without being able to explain exactly how.

Take volunteer retention as an example. An NFP might have someone who is exceptionally good at keeping volunteers engaged and committed.

Part of this may be down to the team member’s warmth and ability to make people feel heard and appreciated. But they’re also drawing on a sophisticated combination of intuitive knowledge, judgement and skills that can be difficult to explain or document.

They might be able to write down some general retention tactics, but much of what makes them good at the job isn’t a set of rules they can simply pass on to someone else. Like the cyclist who can’t explain exactly how they stay upright, they may not be able to explain exactly how they make those judgements in the moment.

The good news is that while tacit knowledge can’t always be put into words, it can still be learnt – at least to some extent. This can happen through shadowing, where a colleague observes an experienced team member at work, or through case debriefs, where the team member talks through what they were noticing and considering during a particular task or project.

The goal isn’t to create a spoken how-to guide. It’s to give the learner a sense of what the experienced person has in mind as they do their job, helping them develop their own understanding and judgement.

Creating a knowledge-sharing culture

The challenge for NFPs is not to capture every piece of knowledge their team members hold – it’s to recognise which knowledge is critical, understand where it sits and create ways for others to learn from it.

There’s no single set of tactics that will work for every organisation, Crichton says. What matters is creating a culture where sharing knowledge is part of how people work – something she believes NFPs are particularly well placed to do.

“I think in the not-for-profit sector, people are more giving,” Crichton says. “Yes, they’re giving of themselves, but they’re also giving of their knowledge. I think good leadership is about creating ways of working that encourage that giving.”

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