A recent Hacker News question was one I have thought about occasionally over the years: what are good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
The comments list several tools and practices, mostly for technical teams. But this one stood out:
I think the solution is more cultural than technical. When a company develops a culture that fosters the creation of technical documentation, and encourages employees to document absolutely everything (both the how and the why), then institutional knowledge is simply a byproduct. When a company focuses much more on shipping products and de-values everything from architecture documentation to API documentation, then institutional knowledge suffers.
This happens all too often in startups that are in go-go mode all the time. Documentation, knowledge capture, instituting processes are dismissed as over-intellectualising at the cost of execution speed. As throwaway work because ‘things change’.
But it is in fact startups that would most benefit from capturing knowledge because the costs of repeating mistakes, or reinventing the wheel as a result of forgotten knowledge are higher than in mature companies.