A digital filing cabinet, even with a good search bar, is still just a dumping ground.
That’s the trap I see most often when organizations say they have a knowledge management strategy: they’ve built a place to store information—invested in what appears as a digital workplace on the surface, but without a mechanism to actually leverage it… surface it… extract the value from it… nor the loop to improve it over time.
Capture isn’t completion. Storage isn’t a strategy.
I joined Happeo Unmuted to dig into this… why content management and KM get conflated and what it costs organizations when they do. We even hit on what I’ve come to refer to as ‘Watermelon Projects’: things in-flight that look green and healthy from a status-report distance, but are red the moment you cut into them. Your org should be learning from these, not repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
One thing I’ve been chewing on since this debuted: the gap almost never shows up in the tooling. The pattern repeats… the knowledge is rarely missing; it’s just orphaned. It lives in someone’s head, or a single stakeholder’s inbox, disconnected from the rest of the org. The fix isn’t a better repository. It’s building the connective tissue… good ol’ people-process-tools harmonization… the ‘constellation’ work of seeing where teams, systems, and priorities actually align, and where they quietly don’t.
That’s the work I find most energizing: taking messy, distributed knowledge across a portfolio and turning it into something an organization can actually act on. If you’re wrestling with a similar problem, or just want to compare notes on where your KM strategy breaks down, I’d enjoy the dialogue.
Thanks especially to host Jesse Bourgeault-Trickey, for having me—and more broadly, to founder Perttu Ojansuu and the Happeo team for creating and sustaining a platform like Happeo Unmuted at all. I think too much of the KM conversation happens in vendor whitepapers or behind closed doors at over-hyped conferences.* Giving real-world practitioners a recurring, public forum to actually debate what knowledge management means (and where most organizations get it wrong) is a real contribution to the field, independent of whose product anyone happens to favor.
*Incidentally, this is one of the trends the Empower KM Conference is trying to turn around as a refreshingly accessible, rich, and inclusive conference option. Check it out!
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