RECOMMENDATION #4:
Encourage a culture of writing

One thing you’ll quickly discover is that Knowledge Management is essentially a form of communication.

As I wrote in Building a Second Brain, a document, note, or other digital item is a message being sent through time to a future recipient. Like any message, the quality of that communication determines whether it is likely to be received and understood on the other end.

A high-quality piece of communication meets the following criteria:

• •  Is it interesting and attention-grabbing? (Does it make people want to read it?)
• •  Is it precise and clear? (Can people easily understand what it’s trying to say?)
• •  Is it empathetic? (Is it written to be understood from the reader’s point of view?)
• •  Does it help people solve a problem? (Is it clearly useful and effective?)
• •  Does it inspire people to take action? (Does it make it easy for others to apply it?)

These questions highlight that effective Knowledge Management boils down to how well people express themselves in writing. To put it simply: the only way to share knowledge effectively is to create a culture of writing within your team.

How do you do that? Here are five ideas that I’ve seen work well:

• •  Set an example: Senior leadership and managers can set an example by regularly sharing their most important ideas and decisions in writing
• •  Offer incentives: Staff at all levels can be rewarded and praised when they take the time to express their thinking in writing
• •  Provide feedback: Direct reports can be offered private feedback on their writing drafts before sharing them more widely
• •  Set aside time for reading: Meetings can begin with “reading time” to emphasize that the context for discussions is best absorbed in written form
• •  Standardize: Adopt a standard term for an internal piece of writing (such as a memo, proposal, one-pager, or article) and create a standard template (such as a Google Doc or Notion page) for doing so

The more encouragement and incentives you offer, the likelier your colleagues are to sit down and compose their ideas in written form. And that habit will lead to higher-quality thinking, better decisions and discussions, and ultimately to more effective Knowledge Management.