When a building catches fire the firefighters arrive, put out the flames and everyone applauds.
Then next morning, there’s another fire on another floor, the firefighters return and there goes another round of applause together with doubts arising… Three weeks later another fire in the same building and the same firefighters come again.
At some point someone has to ask a very uncomfortable question: why are we constantly having the same fires instead of preventing them?
Every firefighter knows something valuable after each incident like where the fire started, how it spread, which materials made it worse, which emergency procedures worked and which didn’t.
If that knowledge stays inside the firefighter’s head, the same fire will always be there it might not return today not tomorrow but it will eventually return and by then instead of learning, the organization starts looking for someone to blame, pointing fingers at people rather than fixing the system that allowed the fire to happen again.
The best fire departments don’t become better because they rely on firefighters who can repeatedly save the day through experience or last-minute problem solving. They become better because every fire becomes a lesson that is documented, standardized, and built into the next response.
It’s no different in logistics for example, when the same warehouse keeps shipping the wrong pallets because labels are “easy to confuse”, and every time an experienced supervisor has to catch the mistake before the truck leaves. Here the business isn’t improving, it’s depending on one person’s knowledge. Real improvement happens when the labeling process is redesigned so the mistake can’t happen again, even when that supervisor isn’t there.
The Cost of Reinventing the Wheel
Someone solves a difficult customer complaint, creates a faster way to prepare reports, discovers a shortcut that saves two hours every week, or figures out how to avoid repeating the same compliance mistake… and then nothing happens.
The solution isn’t documented, it isn’t shared with the rest of the team, it isn’t turned into a standard operating procedure, a checklist, or a playbook it remains nothing more than one person’s experience.
The result is predictable: every time that problem comes back, the organization has to depend on the same person to solve it again. If they’re on vacation, leave the company, or simply aren’t available, everyone else has to rediscover the solution from scratch because the business doesn’t own the knowledge, the individual does.
A McKinsey study estimates that organizations can improve employee productivity by 20–25% simply by making it easier for people to find, share, and reuse what someone in the company already knows.
Let’s think about what that actually means. Productivity doesn’t increase because employees suddenly become more talented or start working longer hours. It increases because they stop wasting time solving problems that someone else has already solved.
That’s one of the most expensive invisible costs in any organization: paying multiple people to repeatedly figure out the same answer.
Research published by Harvard Business Review consistently show that organizations that capture and reuse what they learn innovate faster, solve problems more effectively, and adapt more quickly to change. The reason is simple: knowledge stops belonging to individuals and becomes an organizational asset that everyone can build on.
We often hear leaders say, “O nosso problema é termos trabalhadores que não são proactivos.”
Hey, sometimes that’s true!
But often the real problem is that the organization has no system for turning individual learning into organizational learning.
People quickly understand what is expected of them. If they’re rewarded only for solving problems, they’ll solve problems. If leaders expect them to document what they learn, teach their colleagues, improve procedures, and leave the process better than they found it, those behaviours become part of the job, not an extra task.
If you hire a brilliant employee – the “Albert Einstein” of the company and after just six months they have discovered how to deal with difficult customers, shortcuts inside your ERP, supplier negotiation tricks, better ways of organizing projects and then they resign. If none of that knowledge was documented the organization starts from zero again because they never learned only that employee did.
We saw this in not one but many of the clients we have had the employee becomes the system everyone knows exactly who to ask when something goes wrong or is missing: “Go speak to Maria/ only João knows how that works, Pedro is magical he can always fix that.”
On the surface this looks efficient but it isn’t, that’s dependency disguised as competence. The best organizations slowly remove these dependencies, every recurring problem becomes a question: should someone keep remembering this or should the organization? Every solved problem becomes documentation, every mistake becomes a checklist and very successful project becomes a playbook.
One of the simplest examples comes from emergency services after every major incident, many fire departments conduct what is called an After Action Review no to assign who’s to blame but to ask four simple questions.
What happened? Why did it happen? What worked? What should we change/ do next time?
This is so the answers don’t stay inside the firefighters but can become procedures allowing for the next firefighter to start where the previous one finished.
Research from McKinsey suggests managers in large organizations waste the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of working days every year because decisions and knowledge are repeatedly recreated instead of reused. This is like paying people to solve yesterday’s problem every single week.
Knowledge in an organization should behave like compound interest meaning that every lesson that is learned should make the next employee slightly better otherwise, experience walks out of the door every time someone resigns.
At SENSIT, we believe organizational growth isn’t measured by how much your people know it’s measured by how much your organization remembers.
Because businesses don’t become resilient when they hire exceptional people, they become resilient when exceptional people build exceptional systems that continue working long after they’ve gone and that’s where we come we work with leadership teams to identify where knowledge is trapped inside people transforming recurring problems into repeatable systems.
If you’d like to discover where your organization is losing time, productivity and resilience because critical knowledge lives inside individuals instead of systems, book an Executive Sync with us. We’d love to explore how we can help your organization become smarter every time it solves a problem not just busier.
