Mark Vletter
Mark is a rebel with a cause according to some. An eccentric lunatic and business hippie according to others. We know him as the founder of Voys. Here he reflects on 15 years of learning to build a second brain for organizations. This has been the hidden success factor of companies like WordPress, Gitlab and Voys. Learn how to capture and maximize the combined knowledge of the people that work in your organization in the first of this three-part blog series and upcoming video.
Everyone having access to the same information. It’s an essential part of equal collaboration. But, as simple as it sounds, for many organizations it is not a default to have knowledge available to all colleagues. At the same time, more and more people are working remotely or on a hybrid basis. I strongly feel that knowledge management is the key for organizations to scale up, grow and prosper.
In this blog I’ll tell you why many knowledges systems fail, how to choose a tool that works for your organization and which tool we use at Voys to keep our knowledge fully accessible and up-to-date.
Knowledge bases were invented to make work easier. In practice, however, many knowledge bases actually make work more difficult. The information is outdated, incomplete, not up to date or can’t be found.
In many organizations, people solve this by “asking someone who knows.” This is a short-term solution that works: you can swiftly get back on track with your task, project, or research. But in the long run, it doesn’t help the organization. The information has been transferred from one person to another. And the rest of the colleagues? They still have no idea.
Sharing information on a personal level has three problems:
There are several reasons why many knowledge bases are not complete and up-to-date. These are the most common problems within organizations:
So people either don’t have access to the system; have access but don’t know how it works; know how it works but can’t find, change, add or update information. So having a knowledge base is not enough – you need a knowledge base that people actually use.
Because not every company has the same needs, there is no perfect tool that works for every organization. That’s why it’s important to choose a tool that fits the specific requirements of your organization.
Still, there are a few things that make choosing the right tool for your knowledge management easier:
At Voys, we have used several tools for our knowledge management. We have switched tools a few times over the past 16 years. Sometimes because a better alternative appeared on the market, but also because the needs of our growing organization changed.
This is also where the scalability factor comes into play: if your organization grows, your tools will not always grow with it. A tool is a means, not an end. So as soon as you notice that a tool slows down the sharing of information, it is time to take action.
We started with Mediawiki, the tool that Wikipedia uses, along with our CRM. We called these systems “our memory”. Every time someone had a question, we’d say, ‘Look it up in our Wiki.’ And if it’s not in there, put it in there.’
Our memory became our biggest competitive advantage. Our CRM was open and contained all communication, including email, so it was very easy to take over each other’s work.
Our Wiki contained everything you needed to know to do the work.
If you found a better way to do the work, you just updated the Wiki page. Everyone was always up to date.
Onboarding a new colleague was a breeze and helping our customers was easy. We even opened up part of the system to our customers, so they could find relevant information themselves. If our Memory described a way to do things, but you wanted to do it differently, that was fine. Memory was not a rulebook: it was meant to guide, not determine.
Then we made the switch to Google Sites. This was convenient because it eliminated the need for a separate login. Also, at that time, Google Sites was a lot more user-friendly than Mediawiki, because it didn’t require you to learn any new markup language rules. When Google Sites was updated to a new version, we basically had to rebuild everything. The new Google Sites was slow and had too many options for us, making it a very heavy tool.
On top of that, Google Sites was getting pretty messy. Because people were copy-pasting from Google Drive documents, maintaining some sort of standard became complicated. The tool moved more and more toward building websites. Finally, Google Search in both Google Drive and Google Sites is surprisingly bad.
We needed a real knowledge base and not a website. We noticed that after years of successful knowledge management we were starting to slack off. Information was becoming outdated and teams were using their own systems. Everything we did not want. It was time to find a good solution, usable for the entire organization.
After researching different tools, we ended up with Notion. In Notion, it is very convenient and easy to create a ‘normal’ knowledge base. The barrier to entry is low, the interface is simple and Notion has some very strong advanced features you’ll learn to use along the way. In addition, Notion has strong database components. That makes the system scalable, durable and able to integrate into different workflows.
Of course we didn’t take any chances: after extensive experiments to test how Notion would work for us in practice, we concluded that it is currently the best tool for both all colleagues from novice to expert.
Notion is a very good tool, and for our organization, it is definitely the best choice. But, to be fair, Notion is not perfect. Its default open nature, which is a basic advantage, has one major drawback: it is very easy to break something. And that can sometimes have major consequences. Novice users in particular may be shocked when they accidentally break something. The search feature of Notion should also be improved.
We believe in making mistakes. Because you learn from mistakes. We prefer to see colleagues share their mistakes with the organization because then we all learn from them. Because we have created a safe basis within the organization, colleagues are more likely to start working with Notion.
We also provide training and individual coaching on the use of Notion. We have a few colleagues who are real Notion wizards. They understand exactly how the tool works and also know how to solve it when someone makes a mistake.
You can reach these colleagues via a Slack channel in which anyone can ask questions about Notion. By making these questions public, everyone learns from them, and as soon as communication becomes information it’s moved to Notion again. In addition, these colleagues are always open to an (online) meeting in which they give a general step-by-step explanation or help with a specific issue.
There are four elements that are essential for your knowledge management to succeed, no matter which tool you choose.
I cannot emphasize the importance of these four ingredients enough. In my opinion, it is the only way to make knowledge management work at scale.
What tool are you using for knowledge management? I’d love to chat with you further. You can find me on Twitter as @markv
Part 2: Getting started with Notion: this is what our knowledge base looks like
Part 3: Adding structure to Notion: this is how you make information in your company easy to find
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