When organizations talk about tribal knowledge, the conversation usually starts with retirement, resignation, or “What happens if Dave wins the lottery?”
Those are legitimate concerns. But they also distract from a much bigger problem: Tribal knowledge doesn’t suddenly become expensive when someone leaves. It’s expensive every single day they stay.
Every time someone interrupts your subject matter expert with “Can I ask you a quick question?” your organization pays a small productivity tax. One question takes two minutes. Then another. Then another. Before long, your most experienced people have spent hours answering questions instead of doing the work only they can do.
Those interruptions don’t exist in isolation. According to Asana’s 2026 Anatomy of Work Index, knowledge workers spend 60% of their workday on “work about work”—activities like searching for information, managing shifting priorities, chasing updates, and switching between tools instead of doing the skilled work they were hired to perform.
The cost isn’t dramatic enough to trigger alarm bells. It’s just constant. And that’s what makes it dangerous.
Organizations carefully track software subscriptions, labor costs, and project budgets. Yet one of their biggest operational expenses rarely appears on a spreadsheet. It’s hidden in the interruptions, repeated explanations, duplicate work, endless searches for answers, and time spent waiting for the “expert” to become available.
Individually, each delay seems insignificant. Collectively, they consume hundreds—or even thousands—of hours each year.
The irony? Everyone assumes this is simply “how work gets done.” It doesn’t have to be.
The people holding tribal knowledge are rarely trying to keep information to themselves. In fact, they’re usually the most helpful people in the organization. They answer every question, solve every problem, know which process actually works instead of what’s written in the procedure, and remember why the system was configured a certain way five years ago.
Eventually, everyone learns the fastest path to an answer:
At first, it feels efficient. Eventually, it creates a dependency that slows everyone down.
Documenting everything isn’t the goal. Instead, document the right things in a way people will realistically use. Organizations already have enough documentation collecting digital dust. Making knowledge easy to find, easy to trust, and easy to use is what matters. Creating more documents just to create more doesn’t accomplish that.
The best knowledge management systems don’t replace conversations. They eliminate the unnecessary ones. Instead of answering the same question twenty times, your experts can spend their time solving new problems, improving processes, and mentoring employees where human experience truly matters.
That’s a much better use of expertise.
Many organizations are investing in AI to improve productivity. That’s exciting, but AI can’t retrieve knowledge that exists only in someone’s memory. If critical information isn’t documented, organized, and accessible, AI has nothing reliable to work with. The result? Employees assume the AI isn’t helpful when, in reality, the organization never gave it the information it needed.
Knowledge readiness is quickly becoming AI readiness. Without one, the other struggles. According to Gartner, 63% of organizations either do not have—or are unsure whether they have—the right data management practices to support AI. Gartner also predicts that through 2026, organizations will abandon 60% of AI projects that lack AI-ready data.
Every organization has someone who seems indispensable. They’re the person everyone calls, the one who can fix anything and somehow keeps everything moving. Celebrate those people. But don’t mistake heroics for efficiency.
An organization shouldn’t depend on extraordinary effort to accomplish ordinary work. The strongest organizations don’t eliminate experts. They multiply their impact by making their knowledge available to everyone who needs it. The goal is freeing your experts to do the work that only experts can do.
That’s when knowledge stops being trapped in people and starts becoming an organizational advantage.
Organizations don’t become more efficient because they hire more experts. They become more efficient because expertise is shared, accessible, and reusable. If your best employees spend their days answering the same questions, solving the same problems, and serving as the unofficial help desk, you’ve discovered more than a productivity issue. You’ve uncovered an opportunity.
The organizations that thrive aren’t the ones with the smartest people. They’re the ones that make their collective knowledge available to everyone who needs it.
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Edjlali, Roxane. “Lack of AI-Ready Data Puts AI Projects at Risk.” Gartner. 2/26/25. Accessed 8/03/26. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-02-26-lack-of-ai-ready-data-puts-ai-projects-at-risk
Talbert, Molly. “How work about work gets in the way of real work.” Asana. 4/17/26. Accessed 8/3/26. https://asana.com/resources/why-work-about-work-is-bad