How to go from PKM to OKM – Scaling Knowledge Management

There are A LOT of things that I forget in my day-to-day. But have you ever wondered what happens when an organisation forgets?

And not the small stuff like forgetting to reorder the right nespresso pods. I’m talking about the truly important things. Like how to put humans on the moon. Sounds ridiculous, right?

No one could possibly forget how to do something so monumental. Particularly after NASA spent an estimated $25.4 BILLION dollars aka $194 billion in today’s money to figure it out in the first place.

Except… they did.

Despite creating millions of pages during the Apollo program, NASA discovered decades later that they had effectively lost the ability to repeat their greatest achievement.

Why?

Because when the Apollo engineers retired or moved on, they took something irreplaceable with them: the context.

• The why behind decisions.

• The lessons from failures that never made it into official reports.

• The unwritten know-how that lived exclusively in human minds.

Knowledge would become a “devoid of meaning and human context […] as the rocks of Stonehenge”

The information was there, but without the people who understood it, much of its value was lost.

And this isn’t just NASA’s problem.

According to APQC, knowledge workers burn through 2.8 hours every week just hunting for, re-creating, or duplicating information they already have. That’s 1.5 workdays of the month wasted.

How ridiculous is that?

I see this every day when working with clients.

• The company that can’t onboard new developers because their codebase is a mystery.
• The marketing team recreating campaigns because no one documented what worked last time.
• The executive who can’t make a decision because the context behind previous choices is lost in someone’s email.

Here’s the thing: yes, your company is probably not trying to land on the moon.

You just want to release features, launch campaigns, or serve customers without constantly reinventing the wheel.

Yet you’re bleeding time and money because your knowledge – your most valuable asset – is scattered, hidden, forgotten, or locked in John’s head.

(We all know a John, right? The person who holds so much undocumented knowledge that “just ask John” becomes the default solution to everything)

But what if there was a way to defeat this cycle?

What if you could take the principles of Personal Knowledge Management – the same ones many of us use to organise our own information – and scale them to work for entire teams and organisations?

That’s what we’re going to explore together.

And along the way, we are going to meet four major villains – the Four Horsemen of Knowledge Management – that try sabotage even our best intentions when creating successful Organisational Knowledge Management (OKM).

• The Gatekeeper, who locks crucial expertise inside one person’s head.
• The Necromancer, who buries essential insights under layers of outdated or irrelevant clutter.
• The Phantom, who ensures important information always vanishes precisely when it’s most needed.
• The Illusionist, who distracts your team into documenting trivialities instead of high-impact, revenue-generating knowledge.

You’ll learn exactly how to recognise each of these villains, and I’ll give you tangible, practical ways to defeat them.

Think of it as levelling up from solo play to multiplayer. The fundamentals are the same, but the game changes entirely when you add teammates.

Ready to play?

(it’s dangerous to go alone)

Quick win: Take a minute right now and mentally answer this: “If my most important team member quit tomorrow, what’s the most painful piece of knowledge we’d instantly lose?”

From Solo Player to Multiplayer

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve already dabbled in personal knowledge management.

Maybe you have a beautifully organised Notion workspace with databases for everything from books you’ve read to ideas for future projects.

You know that Zettelkasten is more than just a weird German word.

And you probably know Tiago Forte’s PARA and BASB methodology.

Whatever your method, you’ve recognised something crucial: “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them” as David Allen put it.

And that’s powerful. Good PKM systems transform how individuals work.

But here’s the question that’s been keeping me up at night:

If PKM is so helpful for individuals, why are most organisations still drowning in information chaos?

It’s not like companies don’t recognise the problem. They spend billions on “enterprise solutions” every year and there are whole organisations dedicated to Organisational Knowledge Management.

Yet somehow, Bob still can’t find last quarter’s marketing plan, Alice is reinventing a process someone else perfected six months ago, and everyone’s spending more time switching between apps than actually using them.

So what’s going on?

The same challenge that happens when you go from single player to multiplayer in a video game.

Have you ever watched someone go from single-player mode to their first multiplayer game?

It usually goes like this:

First, confusion.

Then, a brief moment of panic.

And finally, the realisation: “Wait, this is a completely different game!”

Sure, the basics are the same. The controls haven’t changed. You still jump, run, and attack.

But suddenly, you’re coordinating with teammates. You need to communicate clearly, share resources strategically, and anticipate each other’s moves.

In short: your trusty single-player strategies aren’t enough. You’ve just entered a completely different world.

The same holds true when we try to scale personal knowledge management to organisational knowledge management.

The core principles remain valid, but the implementation changes dramatically.

Most organisations try to solve this problem by piling up more rules, more policies, and more folders (“I swear, SharePoint will fix this!”). But if you’ve ever played multiplayer, you know more complexity isn’t always the answer.

Instead, what you need is clarity and alignment.

Or else, OKM will fail.

Oh and if you’re new to PKM and want to build your own Second Brain first?

In that case, check out the resources at buildingasecondbrain.com. You’ll discover practical frameworks and tools to capture, organize, and leverage your most important ideas – whether you’re working solo or leading a team.

The CODE Framework: Solo vs. Team Play

If you’re familiar with Building a Second Brain, you likely know the CODE framework:

• Capture: Save ideas, insights, and inspirations as they come
• Organise: Sort information in a way that makes sense for future retrieval
• Distill: Extract the essence from your notes to find what matters most
• Express: Use your notes to create, share, and contribute

This framework works beautifully for individuals. But what happens when we try to apply it at an organisational level?

Capture becomes… not just collecting personal insights, but establishing shared protocols for documenting collective knowledge. It’s no longer about what YOU find interesting, but what WE need to preserve.

Organise becomes… creating structures that make sense not just to you, but to anyone who might need that information. Your quirky, personal categorisation system won’t work when others need to navigate it.

Distill becomes… actively distributing key insights to ensure they reach people who need them, when they need them.

Express becomes… evolving knowledge continuously as your organisation learns, making sure that documentation reflects current best practices, not historical artifacts.

All of this sounds sensible enough. So why is it so hard to implement in practice?

Because at each step, you’ll face an enemy – a villain that specifically targets that element of your organiszational knowledge management.

(as you can see, we’ll stick with the video game metaphor a while longer)

I call them the Four Horsemen of Knowledge Management.

And before we can build an effective organisational second brain, we need to understand how to defeat each one.

Quick win: Before we tackle these villains, take 60 seconds right now. Write down the single biggest pain your team faces when it comes to sharing or accessing knowledge.

The Gatekeeper: Knowledge Dies Behind Closed Doors

Remember John?

Every team has one.

The undisputed expert whose brain holds the secrets to how everything actually works.

Whenever you’re stuck, the default solution is, “Just ask John.”

Sure, it’s convenient.

At least until John takes a vacation, gets sick or (heaven forbid) finds another job.

Suddenly, everything stops working.

John happens to be the first (accidental) villain of organisational knowledge management: The Gatekeeper.

Gatekeepers aren’t necessarily malicious.

The problem isn’t actually that John knows a lot about his job.

Gatekeepers are usually excellent at their jobs.

The problem is that the organisation has allowed critical knowledge to become concentrated in individuals rather than captured in systems.

This hurts everyone:

• The knowledge holders can’t focus on their actual work because they’re constantly answering the same questions
• The team can’t function when key people are unavailable
• The organisation becomes vulnerable to sudden knowledge loss when people leave
• Innovation stalls because institutional knowledge is trapped in silos

Let me share a quick story to illustrate exactly what this looks like when OKM goes horribly wrong.

When Knowledge Gatekeepers Costs $190 Million

In 2019, the CEO of QuadrigaCX, a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange, suddenly passed away while traveling in India.

Tragic, of course. But this personal tragedy became a business disaster too. Gerald Cotten was the only person who knew the passwords to the company’s offline wallets.

With him gone, $190 million in customer funds were instantly inaccessible.

That’s Gatekeeper risk at its most extreme: critical knowledge locked away with no backup plan.

Sure, your company probably isn’t handling millions in crypto. But you probably have your own version of Gatekeeper risk:

• The sales manager who’s the only one who truly knows your biggest clients.
• The engineer who built your systems but never documented them.
• The executive assistant who’s the only person who knows how to navigate the CEO’s calendar.

Sound familiar?

So, How Do You Defeat the Gatekeeper?

The answer here is pretty much the same as for the first step of CODE in personal knowledge management.

You make sure to create a culture of capturing relevant information.

There are usually two big objections that stop people from writing things down:

• “It takes too much time right now”
• “No one will read this anyway”

We’ll tackle the second one later in the article when we talk about the D in CODE (which happens to be Distribute for organisations).

For now, let’s just quickly address the first issue.

At the end of the day, we can’t get around the fact that creating documentation will take time.

But overall, that investment in the short term will pay off plenty in the long run.

As an individual, if you don’t take the time to write something down now, you will spend multiples of that time later whenever a colleague asks you how to do this.

As a manager, if you don’t create the freedom for your team members to create the documentation before tackling the next job, you lose far more time when you have to replace that team member down the line.

With that in mind, here are a few short tips to make creating documentation today easier:

• Prioritise “Minimum Viable Documentation” or MVD over perfectly formatted docs. Yes, a complete all-in-one handbook would be better, but don’t hold off documenting something
• Leverage tools like Loom or Scribe to create documentation as you go through tasks (rather than writing everything from scratch)
• Use voice dictation in combination with AI to quickly turn a stream of consciousness into a properly formatted SOP.
• Create a single source of truth for your company, for example in Notion, so that everyone knows where to collect documentation.

Quick win: Identify the top three questions your team gets repeatedly. Create simple documentation for each answer, then send people the document instead of typing out an answer whenever you get the question again.

The Necromancer: Where Good Documentation Goes to Die

Ever heard someone say:

“I’m pretty sure we have documentation on that… somewhere.”

I always say: “Sharepoint is where good documentation goes to die”.

If you spend a lot of time documenting your core processes, you need to make sure that it gets to the right places instead of being buried deep in a complex folder structure no one really understands.

Which brings us to our second villain: The Necromancer.

Unlike the Gatekeeper, who traps knowledge in people’s heads, the Necromancer buries it in folders within folders, outdated documents, or scattered files across ten different tools.

It’s not that the information doesn’t exist.

It’s worse: the information is there, but impossible to find or trust.

You probably know the feeling.

After spending hours clicking through nested folders, you finally find the doc you’re looking for only to realise there are three versions.

Two labeled “final,” one labeled “final-final-v3.”

Which one is correct?

Nobody knows.

And suddenly, you’re resurrecting zombie documentation from years ago, only to find out (too late) that it’s dangerously outdated.

Let me show you how costly this kind of knowledge chaos can be.

How Zombie Documentation Cost Knight Capital $460 Million

In 2012, Knight Capital—a major financial trading firm—lost $460 million in less than 45 minutes.

Why?

Because an engineer accidentally deployed new code to seven out of eight servers, leaving one server running outdated, dormant code.

When this old code suddenly sprang to life (like a zombie rising from the dead), it executed millions of trades incorrectly at lightning speed. The result: nearly half a billion dollars vaporised before anyone could stop it.

Knight Capital had some documentation.

But what they lacked was a clear, accessible, and foolproof single source of truth for how to proceed and deploy changes. One that could easily be checked to prevent dangerous zombie code from waking up.

Now, your company probably won’t lose half a billion dollars tomorrow because you couldn’t find that one document. (At least, I hope not.)

But you probably recognise some version of the Necromancer problem:

• Multiple “final” versions of important documents scattered across different locations.
• Information dumped, but not structured for correct deployment.
• Outdated processes still being followed because “that’s the doc I found first.”
• Critical information buried in overly complicated folder structures that no one understands.

Defeating the Necromancer: Building Better Systems

How do you defeat the Necromancer?

The solution lies in the “O” of CODE—Organise. But at an organisational level, organising isn’t just tidying up your personal notes.

It’s about creating intuitive structures everyone can trust and navigate effortlessly.

And it’s the first area where using Notion for Knowledge Management can really make a big difference.

Here are three quick, practical ways to build an organisation system that actually works:

Use Databases, Not Folders:

Traditional folder hierarchies trap your docs in a single context.

Instead, use databases (like Notion) to tag, filter, and sort information by context, owner, status, or anything else you need, so that documentation shows up in the right context, on autopilot.

One Source of Truth (Seriously)

Enforce a “Single Source of Truth” (SSOT) policy. If it’s relevant enough to be documented, it should go in one single place.

Organised instructions, not dumped information

Instead of just dumping every small information onto a doc, make sure to structure them logically and not leave any blank spots.

Imagine you’re designing an Ikea assembly instruction. Break down into small steps, bundle information, visualise where necessary and make everything just very obvious.

Ownership and Refresh Schedules

With tasks, we immediately understand that one person needs to be responsible or you can’t rely on things getting done.

So why is it that we usually just hit save on a document and then leave it be?

Make sure that every piece of documentation has a clear owner – and a “best by” date that indicates when that person should check the document again.

That way, everyone who reads the document knows immediately if they can rely on the information (and who to ping for an update in case it looks like a zombie)

Quick win: Schedule a “Zombie Doc Hunt” right now. What are your oldest documents? Are they still relevant? If now, update or archive them immediately – your OKM will thank you.

The Phantom: You Don’t Quite Believe in It

Our third villain is closely related to the second.

The necromancer causes issues because he buries documents deep inside your organisation and shows you outdated information.

The phantom is a bit sneakier and starts one step earlier: you don’t even look for information (because you don’t think it exists).

This also ties in with our first villain, the gatekeeper, who often comes along because of too many phantoms.

If I spend valuable time creating documentation only to notice that no one ever bothers looking for it and still just asks me the same questions, I will inevitably become demotivated and stop writing in the first place.

To solve it, we need to tackle the third step in the code frame: distribute. But before we get to that, let’s first take a look at how costly this villain can be in practise.

(as you can see, a recurring theme in our OKM stories is the huge cost associated with neglecting it)

How Phantom Knowledge Cost Airbus Billions

In 2006, Airbus had a phantom that turned out to be very, very expensive.

The A380 superjumbo was delayed by nearly two years and cost billions more than expected.

Why?

Because no one looked at the documentation.

Design teams in Germany and Spain had been working with an older version of CAD software, while teams in France and the UK used a newer, incompatible version.

The result? When they integrated their work, they discovered tens of thousands of wiring errors.

Each team held critical knowledge and it never occurred to them to check with the others until it was far too late.

The knowledge existed, but at the critical moment, it was effectively invisible.

Your company probably isn’t wiring airplanes. (though if you are, please pay close attention!)

But I bet you’ve experienced something similar:

• Your sales team misses important context because crucial notes are stuck in a CRM that nobody checks.
• Customer support agents reinvent answers because knowledge articles are never surfaced when tickets are opened.
• Project teams stumble through the same problems because key lessons learned from previous projects vanish into rarely checked archives.

Defeating the Phantom: Delivering Knowledge in Context

Your documentation is only as good as your distribution.

And no, distribution doesn’t mean sending a weekly email with new documentation updates.

(Let’s be honest, nobody reads those anyway).

Instead, it means proactively surfacing knowledge exactly when and where people need it most.

And this pretty much comes down to one thing.

Connect the knowledge side of the business with the action side.

Don’t have different silos to do the work and then to document the work.

This is one of the big strengths of tools like Notion that allow you to combine both sides of the business in one place.

If you followed the advice from step number 2 “O for Organise” (aka defeating the Necromancer), you already moved your knowledge from folders to databases.

Which means it’s now fairly simple to connect this database to your tasks, projects and meetings.

Just imagine how powerful it would be if an SOP was automatically attached to the specific task you assigned to someone, or if every meeting document was linked to the policies that were discussed in it.

Plus, whenever someone in the future looks back at a project, they can easily find all relevant information about it in one place.

This is where a tool like Notion introduces real super powers for your company knowledge management that goes beyond simple notes or project management.

The Illusionist: Documentation Theatre at Its Finest

After spending a lot of time talking about how important it is to document things and encouraging you to write everything down in a single source of truth, the last step is all about doing the opposite – not documenting the wrong thing.

Because just because you could write something down, doesn’t mean you should.

In fact, this is probably the biggest hurdle that companies fail at, even when they’re motivated to create better documentation.

They get tempted by the forth villain: the illusionist.

This villain makes your organisation feel productive because you’re constantly busy documenting something.

But what you’re documenting doesn’t actually move the needle.

Instead of capturing the critical knowledge that drives your core business forward, you’re meticulously documenting processes like “How to Clean the Coffee Machine.”

Don’t get me wrong. Good coffee is important and someone should probably clean the machine from time to time.

But if your coffee machine documentation is more detailed and up-to-date than your client onboarding process, you’ve got a problem.

However, this is exactly what often happens when a new knowledge management initiative is started.

Everyone is all excited and finally bought into the vision.

Maybe you even get the team together for a kick-off day where everyone hunkers down and creates a first piece of documentation.

The brainstorming starts for processes that should be documented.

And inevitably, you’ll hear a lot of suggestions like this:

• How to apply for vacation days
• The office dress code on Fridays
• Coffee, Coffee, Coffee
• How to fix the printers when they inevitably get stuck again.

All valid suggestions, and in an ideal world, you would probably have documentation for these things in your OKM.

But in the daily setup of business where every hour counts and you probably won’t get around to document really everything you want to document.

Any non-core business workflows are big distractions.

And the tough part with this villain is that it’s very hard to give a general recommendation.

Just look at this example where “how to fix the printer” actually turned out to be one of the most important things they could have possibly documented.

Xerox’s $100 Million Eureka Moment

In the 1990s, Xerox had thousands of technicians repairing photocopiers around the globe. Each technician learned through trial and error, independently solving the same problems again and again.

Then Xerox created the “Eureka” database. Eureka was a simple platform where technicians could document and share high-impact repair tips and solutions to tricky problems.

The result?

A team in Brazil avoided scrapping a $40,000 copier by finding a documented fix. A 90-cent connector solution, posted by colleagues in Canada.

Overall, Eureka saved Xerox an estimated $100 million by ensuring technicians weren’t endlessly rediscovering solutions to problems their colleagues had already solved.

Xerox didn’t waste time documenting trivialities.

They zeroed in on their critical value drivers (maintenance for printers) and saw dramatic results.

Today, this becomes even more powerful because your team can leverage AI for context-aware search that might find solutions in adjacent topics you never thought of checking otherwise.

Defeating the Illusionist: Focus on What Matters

In CODE for PKM, the last step is “Express”.

You turn your notes into tangible outcomes and specific projects.

At the organisational level, I rather refer to this last step as Evolve, because it’s all about making sure that your documentation actually drives your business forward.

So, whenever you look at a process and ask yourself whether you should document this right now, the guiding question should be: “Will this process help improve the company tomorrow?”

To make this a bit more tangible, here are two helpful frameworks to discover what is worth documenting and what should better be left for later.

Your Core Value Engines

No matter what business you are in, you will have core value engines that help drive your business forward.

You can break down this concept further into three distinct areas:

1. How you get new clients
2. How you serve those clients
3. How you improve your product to better serve clients in the future

When thinking about what you should document first, pick any of these three areas and think about the most important thing that you currently do there.

This should be your starting point for the documentation and none of the “nice-to-have” documents should be started before you don’t have a rough draft in place.

The $10K Framework

The 10K framework is a prioritisation framework developed by Khe Hy to help evaluate how impactful a specific activity is in your day-to-day.

Typically, this framework is used for individuals to help identify how important any given task on your to-do list is.

It helps safeguard against filling up your day with countless little tasks that feel productive but ultimately don’t move the needle.

• $10/hour work: Small, repetitive tasks that feel productive but ultimately don’t move the needle (think: cleaning up your inbox or scheduling meetings).
• $100/hour work: Tasks that streamline processes but don’t transform outcomes (think: productivity hacks, automation setup, or building overly detailed CRM systems).
• $1,000/hour work: High-skill tasks that directly drive revenue, but still rely heavily on individual expertise (think: expert consulting, specialised problem-solving).
• $10,000/hour work: Strategic, high-leverage tasks that plant seeds for long-term growth and transformation (think: strategic hiring, building systems and frameworks, nurturing powerful partnerships).

We can adapt this same lens to organisational documentation, focusing on two tiers specifically:

• $1,000 Documentation: Essential processes and workflows that directly support your core business. Documenting these ensures consistency, quality, and scalability. Think:
  • Client onboarding checklists
  • Standard operating procedures for your key services
  • Critical troubleshooting guides
• $10,000 Documentation: Strategic knowledge and big-picture processes that significantly multiply your future success. These documents transform your company’s trajectory. Think:
  • Playbooks for hiring and training exceptional talent
  • Frameworks for developing new revenue streams
  • Strategic product development insights and experiments

But how do you spot the difference between valuable $1,000/$10,000 documentation and the trivial $10/$100 stuff?

Ask yourself these questions:

• Would losing this knowledge cost us significant money, clients, or momentum? If the answer is yes, it’s at least a $1,000-level priority.
• Would documenting this once, clearly and strategically, create massive value in the future by saving hours of effort or significantly improving outcomes for years to come? If yes, you’ve got a $10,000-level priority.

And on the flip side, here’s how to quickly recognise low-value documentation:

• $10 Documentation: Feels productive, but nobody references it. (Your 50-step guide on office supplies ordering.)
• $100 Documentation: Useful occasionally, but rarely impacts your core business. (An overly detailed directory of every networking contact your team has ever made.)

When time is scarce—and it always is—start at the top:

• First, clearly document your $10,000-level big-picture processes.
• Next, ensure your critical $1,000-level business processes are reliable and easily accessible.
• And only if you have extra capacity (spoiler: you probably don’t) should you dive into the lower-value stuff.

In short, documentation should never become documentation theatre. Focus relentlessly on your Core Value Engines and your high-leverage $10,000-level documentation—and watch how quickly the real impact shows up.

Bringing It Home: Build Your Organisation’s Second Brain

So, here’s where we stand.

We’ve walked through the four villains that quietly sabotage your organisation’s knowledge:

• The Gatekeeper, who locks critical knowledge inside individual heads.
• The Necromancer, who buries it under layers of complexity and outdated systems.
• The Phantom, who ensures that even when knowledge exists, you don’t even think of it
• The Illusionist, who keeps everyone busy documenting the wrong things.

We’ve explored how to defeat each one.

Not with more policies, folders, or busywork, but by scaling the principles of personal knowledge management (CODE) into an organisational second brain.

And most importantly, we’ve reframed what “good” looks like:

✅ Capture the knowledge that matters.

✅ Organise it in ways people can actually navigate.

✅ Distribute it where and when it’s needed.

✅ Evolve it so it keeps driving the business forward.

But here’s the truth: no tool, no framework, no blog post (yes, even this one) will magically fix your knowledge problems overnight.

What will?

Small, consistent action.

It’s one team starting a Friday FAQ habit.

It’s one product manager linking an SOP to a task.

It’s one leader setting the tone by documenting how decisions get made or regularly pushing what OKM means for the team.

You don’t have to fix everything today. You just have to start.

Because the biggest risk your organisation faces isn’t a lack of documentation.

It’s the slow erosion of critical knowledge, hidden in plain sight, until one day you realise you’ve forgotten how to land on the moon.