Main idea

Organisations know how to produce sources: they document, transcribe, centralise, index, automate the collection of user feedback. Part of the useful knowledge nevertheless stays in people's heads, and the usual explanation — people do not want to share, they have no time — does not account for it.

This knowledge is not unwritten because it would be impossible to write. It is unwritten because it is born in interpretation, in conversations, in weak ties, in details too small to become documents spontaneously. None of these elements ever presents itself as a subject. What a product manager understands after three exchanges with a customer has, at the moment of understanding, neither the size nor the sharpness of an object you deposit somewhere.

The lack is therefore a lack of a form to receive it, not a lack of willingness.

Why it matters

This shifts the lever. A sharing policy, an injunction to document, a mandatory field in a tool all address willingness, and fail against a constraint of form.

It also qualifies the cultural diagnosis applied to knowledge-capitalisation projects: part of what gets attributed to information hoarding or to status simply comes from there having been no receptacle for material of that size.

Nuances and limits

The formal reason does not cancel the postural one. Refusing to share an understanding that underpins your own position in the organisation remains a distinct calculation, which the best channel does not lift.

And part of this knowledge has no form at all because it is not yet formulated even for the person carrying it: they would first have to know what they know.

Open questions

• What is it, in a receptacle, that lets you deposit an understanding you have not yet managed to name?