Knowledge management

Because communities of practice are loosely knit, they cannot be created by external forces such as management pressure. They can only be supported and nurtured if they are truly essential to the organization.

While cross-functionality creates silosloosely knit, communities of practice break them down: because they are loosely knit, and centralize conversations around a specific subject matter, they help avoid situations where a cross-functional team isolates from everyone else, promoting knowledge sharing and reuse.

Learning a new domain typically happens in four phases:

Explicit knowledge is characterized by the fact that it can be easily captured in some form: a book, a course, a seminar, or any other medium. It is the most basic form of knowledge, and the one we usually think about when imagining expertise.

Because it ties your self worth to not making mistakes, and mistakes are necessary for knowledge-management.

Memory gives you a web of facts/references that you can use to put new information into context. It allows you to answer questions with deduction, without having to look up key facts.

While explicit knowledge can be captured, tacit knowledge cannot be captured—or at least, not in a very practical way.

Transient notes are valuable scratchpads for supporting working memory, but knowledge should accrete (see Note-Writing Practices Provide Weak FeedbackDesigning a Better Thinking-Writing MediumIdeas need to be grappled with, Designing a Better Thinking-Writing MediumIdeas need to be grappled with). Transient notes should be an input for evergreen notes, which you refine and cultivate over time (Ideas need to be grappled with).

Writing is the first thing I remember falling in love with: I started creating stories in kindergarten, and I’ve never stopped since—it’s just that the stories have, for the most part, become fictional and contain more numbers.

A system is any interconnected set of elements working together to accomplish a broader purpose. Systems thinking is the ability to understand what kind of system(s) are useful to consider in a given scenario, how those systems work, and how to direct the systems to shape their behavior.