Institutional Knowledge

I was the primary organizer for a public event just now and it’s a lot of work. Nothing particular hard so if you mess up the response is mostly incredulous “how could you forget to...etc” but the actual job is extremely amorphous. There are social expectations and norms that have simply grown over time. And any deviation is perceived negatively. It is very stressful. 

And it’s mostly logistics. Having the right phone number and placing the call in a timely manner. NBD. But a lot more work to find out that it needs to happen and then also how to make it happen.

So instead of about two hundred emails to various people and dozens of phone calls it would be LOT easier if this amorphous knowledge base had been collated in a single document. This is what I’m doing now. It’s something I learned from my LEAPS organization: a single google doc, easily shared with the next person or for myself next time round.

That is institutional knowledge. If you encounter something that was mostly a pain to figure out how to do, make a playbook for it for the next person. Or yourself in a year’s time. It should help with anxiety at least.