The Cost of Undocumented Knowledge

Every institution has one. The staff member who somehow knows everything: where the extra hymnals are stored, which login still works for the old giving platform, why the gym floor squeaks near half-court and who you're supposed to call about it. Leadership treats her as a gift, and she is one, right up until the day she retires, or takes another job, or just gets the flu for two weeks, and the institution discovers that "she knows everything" was quietly doing the job of about four documents that were never written.

Most institutions don't actually have a knowledge management system. They have a Carol. And Carol is wonderful, right up until Carol is unavailable, at which point the institution doesn't have slow access to the answer. It has no access to the answer, and somebody spends three days reconstructing what could have taken three minutes to read.

The risk was never that one person knew a lot. Knowing a lot is fine. The risk is that the knowledge exists in exactly one place. Vendor relationships and the rates that were actually negotiated. The real reason behind a decision, not just the decision itself, like why a committee meets quarterly instead of monthly, or why the parish switched insurance carriers three years ago. The informal map of who actually has influence versus who just has the title on the door. The seasonal rhythms, enrollment cycles, the fundraising calendar, accreditation prep, that only make sense once you've lived through one full year of them. None of this shows up in a job description. All of it walks out the door the day the person carrying it does.

We've seen what it costs when this goes wrong. At one Catholic school, the tuition assistance program had run for eight years almost entirely out of the business manager's personal spreadsheet, plus her own judgment calls about which families needed extra grace on a payment timeline. When she left in the middle of a school year, the new hire inherited no record of payment plans already promised and no written criteria for how awards got decided. Families who thought they'd settled this months earlier found themselves explaining it all over again to a stranger. None of it was anyone's fault, exactly. It just never occurred to anyone that "I'll remember" wasn't actually a system, until the person doing the remembering was gone.

It also doesn't have to go that way. At one parish cluster, we sat down with the staff member who ran sacramental records and the stewardship database, the one everyone half-joked could run the whole parish from a desert island, and spent two sessions writing down, step by step, how she actually did her job. Where things lived. Who to call when something broke. What the deadlines were and when they actually mattered. None of it turned out to be complicated. It only seemed complicated because it had never once left her head. When she dropped to part-time the following year, the handoff took two weeks instead of the six months everyone had quietly been dreading.

A few ways to tell whether your institution is carrying knowledge or just hosting it.

• The real test isn't whether someone knows the answer. It's whether a second person could find it without calling her on vacation.
• Write down the reasoning behind a decision, not just the decision, so the next person isn't stuck guessing why something was done a certain way.
• Knowledge transfer works best months before someone's last week, not during it, once there's no time left for follow-up questions.
• If someone's departure would open up a multi-month gap, that gap already exists today. It just hasn't been discovered yet.

There's a kindness underneath the operational case too. Nobody should have to feel like the place falls apart without them. People sometimes mistake that feeling for job security, but carrying that much alone, quietly, for years, is just pressure without a name. The people who hold an institution's memory deserve more support than being its only backup.

Jill Wollmer

Founder, Pax Ordo Advisors · June 2026