Category: Art

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The cost of lost knowledge, does anyone care?

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn, here.

Someone once shared a story with me about a VP who was hit by a truck and died. The company spent more than 3 years trying to recreate the knowledge that was lost in that tragic accident. It was the whole reason they started their KM program.

I have thought about knowledge loss from layoffs, retirements, voluntary resignations on and off for years. There is so much knowledge lost and many organisations don’t seem to care.

When I first started in KM the big issue was how organisations needed to prepare for Baby Boomers leaving the workforce and what needed to be done to try to save their knowledge for those who were left behind still working.

Later, in the early years of the pandemic, there were waves of layoffs, without any thought given to saving the knowledge. Employees were notified in the middle of the night and locked out of the organisation’s systems.

Now there are the layoffs attributed to AI, and companies discovering a few months later that AI doesn’t live up to the promises and they have to re-hire people to fill the roles they just laid people off from and the new hires need to ramp up quickly from knowledge and information that was never saved.

Knowledge is lost again and again and again. No one seems to care. (Some organisations seem to figure it’s in the repositories somewhere, AI will find it–not if it wasn’t actually put in the repositories in the first place, not if there was no governance, not if it was tacit and not able to be captured.)

Many of the situations I just outlined are done at the organisation’s discretion, but what happens when someone leaves an organisation of their own free will, and the organisation replaces them? We normally think about recruitment fees and lost productivity–the onboarding and ramp-up costs. We rarely count what walks out the door with them: the context behind decisions they were part of, the relationships that made projects work, the knowledge nobody wrote down.

In Canada, the average cost of turnover is now over $30,000 per departure. Much of that is hidden, and much of it is knowledge loss.

I have been thinking about the role Radical KM could have in a situation like that–organisations that want to keep their people and what those people know. What would help people be more engaged so that they didn’t want to leave? What would help capture their knowledge and encourage them to share it while they were still part of the organisation? What would help new hires develop a sense of belonging?

Radical KM uses arts-based activities to build meaning, agency and community, the conditions that make people stay and share. It captures knowledge before people leave, rather than after.

It isn’t a fix for pay or workload (which are some of the reasons why people leave) and I would never claim that it is. But if you’re an HR or L&D leader who’s felt the cost of people leaving, I’d like to hear how you’re seeing it.

What’s the most expensive departure you’ve seen, in knowledge rather than money?

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Transforming Organisations Through Arts-Based Interventions

(This post was originally shared on LinkedIn, you can find it here.)

Most organisations are running on empty. Burnout, disengagement and a constant push to optimise processes have left many people feeling more disconnected than ever. Yet the resource most often overlooked is one every organisation already has: human creativity.

Arts-based interventions (ABIs) use drawing, painting, theatre, music, poetry and storytelling to help people think, collaborate and learn differently. They are not decoration. They are a practical way to address the roots of workplace dysfunction.

Why it works

Art engages emotion, memory and reasoning at once. This builds cognitive flexibility, the brain’s capacity to make new connections. Einstein described a similar process he called “combinatory play”, blending analytical and creative thinking to solve problems.

Researchers Ariane Berthoin Antal and Anke Strauß identified 14 categories of added value from ABIs, including personal development, perspective-taking, better collaboration and stronger crisis management.

What artists can teach us

Artists bring curiosity, resilience and comfort with uncertainty, what researchers call an “artistic attitude”. Leonardo da Vinci’s habits of sharpening the senses, balancing logic with imagination and making new connections are, in effect, 21st-century workplace skills.

The barrier is mostly internal

The hardest part of ABIs isn’t logistics. It’s the stories we tell ourselves: “I’m not an artist.” “I’ll look silly.” Many of us carry bad memories of art from school. But overcoming that fear builds confidence in other areas of life, too.

Where ABIs help

Innovation: Letting the mind wander generates the volume of ideas from which breakthroughs emerge. Not every idea will stick, so more ideas mean a better chance that one will.

Team building: Because most people feel a little exposed, ABIs level hierarchies and surface communication problems that might otherwise stay hidden.

Learning: ABIs make learning engaging and personally meaningful rather than compliance-driven.

Two ways in

The icebreaker stream uses five to ten minutes at the start or end of a meeting, through scribble drawings, guided visualisations or story cubes. The studio stream creates dedicated space and longer experiences for strategy work, with internal facilitators and ongoing programmes. It’s both-and, not either-or.

Proof points

In the 1990s, Xerox PARC’s Artist-in-Residence programme paired artists working in new media with scientists. Planned as a one-year experiment, it ran for six years because of its impact on innovation.

Departments of the Danish government had struggled for ten years with a lack of collaboration and knowledge sharing. In a five-day workshop built on arts-based methods, a team solved the problem. The studio stayed in place for two years afterwards.

Start small

Frame your first attempt as an experiment. Begin with a group that is already friendly, and let the experience speak for itself. Energy shifts, and responses become more thoughtful and detailed. Measure what you can, such as engagement, retention and collaboration quality, but don’t reduce the creative process to numbers.

The future is human

As AI and automation reshape work, the distinctly human capabilities ABIs develop become more valuable, not less. The secret to productivity may be less discipline than joy.

The question isn’t whether your organisation can afford arts-based interventions. It’s whether it can afford not to.

Sources: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2021), “Radical Knowledge Management”; Meisiek & Barry and Berthoin Antal & Strauß in Artistic Interventions in Organisations (Routledge, 2016); Darsø, Artful Creation (2004).

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ABIs Are Your Tools. They’re Not About Creating Art

(This post was originally shared on my LinkedIn Profile.)

For years (I’ve been working on this idea for 15+ years), when I mention arts-based interventions in KM conversations, I watch the same response play out. Eyes light up. Then — a gentle retreat. “That sounds lovely,” they say, “but we’re not really an arty organisation,” or “I work with a bunch of lawyers/engineers/accountants, they will never do this stuff”.

I understand the hesitation. We’ve been conditioned to think of arts-based work as something separate from serious business — creative indulgence rather than strategic leverage. But that’s not what ABIs are.

ABIs are tools. Specifically, they’re tools for doing the thing KM practitioners struggle with most: getting people to think.

In a world drowning in information and increasingly suspicious of what we’re told, our core challenge isn’t capturing knowledge, storing it better, or finding it when it’s needed. It’s reactivating the curiosity, critical thinking, and continuous learning that so many organisations have accidentally designed out of their cultures.

Here’s the paradox: you can’t mandate creativity. You can’t drive critical thinking with a policy. And you certainly can’t build psychological safety — the actual foundation of knowledge sharing — through process and conversation. These things live in the human layer, and they respond to something more subtle than corporate edicts.

That’s where creativity becomes a tool rather than a luxury.

When you ask someone to paint their response to “What does trust look like in our team?” you’ve created a constraint that forces novel thinking. They can’t fall back on corporate-speak. They can’t hide behind jargon. The unfamiliar medium — the act of making something — bypasses the rational filters and surfaces what people actually think and feel.

You’re not running an art class. You’re creating conditions for knowing to emerge.

ABIs work because they:

  • Disrupt habitual thinking. Familiar formats produce familiar responses. A different medium invites different pathways.
  • Create psychological safety through ambiguity. There’s no “correct” answer to a painting or a collage. That removes the performance anxiety that stifles honesty.
  • Make the tacit visible. The patterns in how someone uses colour, composition, or materials often reveal assumptions and thinking they hadn’t consciously articulated.
  • Invite full-system engagement. The hand, the eye, and the brain working together create a different quality of attention than sitting in a meeting watching slides.
  • Generate genuine conversation. When artefacts are at the centre — not abstractions — dialogue becomes richer, more grounded, and more memorable.

I’m not asking you to turn your people into artists. I’m asking you to consider: what if the tool you’re looking for to unlock knowing isn’t another platform, another framework, or another consultant-led workshop? What if it’s permission to engage your people’s creativity as a capacity rather than a personality trait?

Because here’s what I’ve learned: people don’t lose their creativity in organisations. They’re just trained not to use it where it matters most.

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Stop Talking About Knowledge Management. Start Showing Its Impact

(This post was originally shared on my LinkedIn Profile.)

Your organisation doesn’t have a knowledge management problem. It has a credibility problem.

You can launch the most elegant KM programme, design the cleverest framework, or build the sleekest knowledge platform. But if nobody sees how it changes the way work actually gets done, they won’t care. And why should they?

The organisations that genuinely embed knowledge management aren’t the ones with the loudest programmes. They’re the ones where people notice that knowledge moves, decisions get made faster, and reinvention stops happening.

Here’s how that actually occurs in practice.

1. Anchor to outcomes, not terminology

Stop leading with “knowledge management.” Lead with the outcome your organisation desperately needs: faster decision-making, reduced reinvention, onboarding that doesn’t take six months, compliance that’s actually defensible, or customer responsiveness that beats your competitors.

The frameworks work behind the outcomes. Make them invisible. When a senior leader notices that new hires are productive in weeks instead than months, or that a decision gets made because the right knowledge actually arrived, they start valuing what made it possible. They just don’t call it “KM.”

2. Build credibility through small, visible wins

Don’t launch a programme across the enterprise. Pick one team—preferably one where knowledge clearly gets lost or repeated—and work with them quietly.

Document what changes: time saved, mistakes avoided, ideas that moved between people. Then let their story travel.

Peer testimony is infinitely more powerful than a pitch from the programme office. People trust other practitioners. They’re suspicious of consultants.

3. Make trust the visible difference

Here’s what I’ve observed: organisations that fail at KM typically have a trust problem they don’t know they have. Information gets hoarded. Knowledge is buried behind permission structures. Sharing is punished or seen as losing advantage.

You can’t recognise knowledge management in that environment because the conditions for knowledge to actually travel don’t exist.

The organisations I’ve seen shift? They model something different. Generosity. Honesty. The willingness to say “I don’t know” without it costing you. Inquiry before judgment. These aren’t soft skills. They’re the infrastructure that makes knowledge move.

And if you’re driving KM, you have to model them first.

4. Celebrate the human story, not the system

People don’t care about your knowledge base. They care that they’re not reinventing the wheel at 3 p.m. on a Friday, or that someone remembered a client context that completely changed the conversation.

Recognition happens when you celebrate the person who shared as much as the knowledge that was shared. When you tell the story of how an idea travelled across teams and landed somewhere unexpected. When you highlight the person who documented their thinking so clearly that six months later, someone else could understand the reasoning behind a decision.

Make knowledge sharing visible as a human thing, not a compliance requirement.

5. Make it a leadership conversation

KM recognition happens when your executive team starts talking about knowledge as how we work here—not as a project sitting in a corner.

This means asking leadership questions:

  • Are decisions documented in a way that the logic is actually recoverable?
  • Do people have permission to ask questions without it being seen as weakness?
  • Is failure treated as learning, or is it buried?
  • Do you privilege speed over understanding, or vice versa?
  • Does your culture reward knowledge-hoarding or knowledge-sharing?

These aren’t KM questions. They’re leadership questions. But they’re the ones that determine whether knowledge management actually takes root.

6. Measure what actually matters

Forget knowledge base articles indexed. Forget training completion rates. Those metrics measure activity, not impact.

Track what actually shifts:

  • How much faster are people becoming capable?
  • Are the same questions still cycling through support?
  • Do ideas travel between teams that normally don’t connect?
  • Are decisions getting revisited repeatedly, or is the reasoning clear enough that people move forward with confidence?

Be rigorous about it. “We saved time” is vague. How much? For whom? What else did they do with the time they reclaimed?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Recognition follows credibility, and credibility comes from solving real problems quietly and consistently.

The organisations that genuinely “get” knowledge management didn’t get there through programme launches and change management initiatives. They got there because someone in a position of influence—often a team leader, sometimes a practitioner—demonstrated that knowledge actually matters to outcomes. And that became the way things worked.

Stop announcing KM. Start showing what happens when knowledge moves the way it should.

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Why Your Knowledge Management Strategy Needs the Arts

(This post was originally shared on my LinkedIn Profile.)

Most knowledge management strategies focus on systems, processes, and technology. But what if the missing piece is a scribble drawing?

Knowledge Work Has a Creativity Problem

We have built our organisations around efficiency metrics and linear processes — get from A to B to C in the most direct line possible. But knowledge work does not actually work that way. It requires curiosity, reflection, and iteration. It demands that people make unexpected connections, ask uncomfortable questions, and see the bigger picture.

Those capacities are not switched on by yet another technology upgrade.

This is the premise of Radical Knowledge Management — a framework developed to bring creativity and arts-based interventions (ABIs) deliberately into KM practice. The definition of KM at the heart of this approach is broader than the traditional one: rather than merely connecting people to documented knowledge, it focuses on enabling people to find and create the knowledge they need to do their jobs — including through continuous learning and new ways of thinking.

What Are Arts-Based Interventions?

Arts-based interventions are activities that use an artistic medium or discipline to improve a process or situation. In organisational settings, the most common artistic modalities include drawing, painting, photography, theatre, music, poetry, improvisation, and storytelling.

These are not team-building novelties bolted on to the end of a strategy day. Used deliberately, they are instruments for culture change, innovation, leadership development, problem-solving, and organisational transformation.

There are at least twelve use cases for ABIs in organisations:

  1. Culture change
  2. Innovation
  3. Wellness
  4. Getting unstuck
  5. Sustainable leadership
  6. Team building
  7. Collaboration
  8. Problem-solving
  9. Amplifying learning
  10. Transformation
  11. Creating community
  12. Employee engagement

Because of the interconnected nature of these activities, focusing on ABIs for one use case tends to positively affect the others as well.

Why ABIs Belong Inside Your KM Strategy

There is a tendency to think of creativity as a bolt-on — something for design or marketing, or perhaps for the occasional off-site. The argument for placing ABIs firmly within KM rests on something more fundamental.

Knowledge is created by people. It is intangible, complex, and deeply social. In our increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, the knowledge we most urgently need cannot be captured in a database. It lives in the capacity of people to think differently, collaborate across silos, and remain curious even under pressure.

ABIs directly support those capacities. They help people tap into skills and behaviours that formal education and career pressures have pushed into dormancy. They encourage people to get out of their comfort zones, see the bigger picture, and ask different questions. In doing so, they create new knowledge — and they shift organisational culture towards one that supports knowledge sharing rather than knowledge hoarding.

As Albert Einstein observed, imagination is more important than knowledge; knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world. Arts-based interventions are one of the most reliable ways to fuel imagination in the workplace.

The MAGIC-SH Framework

For organisations ready to take this seriously, the Radical KM framework provides a practical structure organised around the acronym MAGIC-SH:

S & H — Sustainable and Human. This is the foundation. ABIs make organisations more sustainable because they help people see the interconnectedness of things and develop sustainable leadership behaviours. They also reinforce the humanity of work — critical at a time when technology threatens to crowd out the very qualities that make people valuable.

The Nine Cs. The middle layer of the framework encompasses the concepts that ABIs develop and evolve:

  1. Creativity — producing novel ideas and approaches
  2. Collaboration — building the trust that makes real knowledge sharing possible
  3. Communication — developing empathy and purposeful expression (improv theatre is particularly powerful here)
  4. Content — shaping what knowledge is captured and how
  5. Critical thinking — challenging the “that’s how we’ve always done it” assumption
  6. Conversation — opening new avenues for dialogue and insight
  7. Culture — shifting the organisation towards one that values learning and sharing
  8. Confidence — building the self-belief to ask for help, try new approaches, and share imperfect knowledge
  9. Change management — supporting the cultural shift that ABIs require

A, G, I — ABIs, Ideas, Innovation and the Guerrilla approach. These represent both the outputs sought (fresh ideas and innovation) and the practical approach recommended: starting small, positioning ABIs as experiments, and growing support iteratively.

M — Metrics. Measurement comes last — not because it is unimportant, but because defining metrics too early can constrain the very creative exploration that makes ABIs valuable.

How to Start: Two Practical Pathways

There is no need to overhaul your entire KM programme. Radical KM explicitly recommends starting small and iterating.

The Icebreaker stream begins at the individual or team level with short, low-stakes activities: a guided visualisation at the start of a meeting, a scribble drawing exercise during a workshop, an improvisational warm-up before a strategy session. These take as little as five minutes, but they shift the energy and engagement in the room, build psychological safety, and begin to normalise the idea that creativity belongs at work.

The Studio stream takes a larger, more structured approach — dedicated sessions, longer interventions, and formal integration into KM processes such as knowledge capture workshops, after-action reviews, or communities of practice.

In both cases, the implementation approach is the same: treat it as an experiment, start with early adopters, debrief afterwards, and iterate based on what you learn. Change management is essential — people have often been educated to believe that the arts are wasteful, and that belief takes time and consistent experience to shift.

The Hardest Part

The biggest obstacle to incorporating ABIs into a KM strategy is not logistics. It is the stories we tell ourselves about why we cannot — or should not — do it. What will my colleagues think? Are the benefits really there? Is this really my job?

Those doubts are understandable. Most of us had our creativity criticised or ignored somewhere around adolescence, and we learned to put it away as unprofessional.

But look around your team. Someone is doodling during calls. Someone uses role-play to prepare for difficult conversations. Someone plays an icebreaker game at the start of team stand-ups. The arts and creativity are already finding their way into your workplace — unconsciously. Radical KM simply asks you to be more deliberate about it.

The first time you try a scribble drawing exercise in a knowledge management workshop, you may be pleasantly surprised. The energy and engagement in the room shifts. Responses become more thoughtful and detailed. People make connections they would not otherwise have made. The knowledge that flows is richer.

A Final Thought

In a world shaped by AI, automation, and relentless change, the knowledge and capabilities that most need managing are the human ones: curiosity, resilience, empathy, imagination, and the willingness to keep learning. Those are not developed by better taxonomy.

They are developed through practice — and arts-based interventions are one of the most evidence-supported ways to practise them.

Your KM strategy does not need an overhaul. It needs a scribble drawing, and the courage to see what happens next.

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Radical KM Institute Announcement

There are now three courses/programs available on the RadicalKM.Institute website.

The White Belt course has been available since earlier this year (February 2024), and is an introduction to Radical KM, it is free. You can find out about it here.

The Green Belt course has just been released (November 2024). It takes Radical KM a step further, with more complex ideas about implementing/using Radical KM. The course includes videos and other supplemental information. You can find out about it here.

Finally, an comprehensive program including 1:1 coaching. This program is designed to complete the Radical KM picture and help knowledge managers implement Radical KM in their organisation by providing in depth Radical KM knowledge and 1:1 coaching. You can check it out here.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch, I’m always happy to talk. You can book a time with me here.

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Creating a knowledge sharing culture

Are you wondering how to create a culture more conducive to knowledge sharing, collaboration, innovation, trust, and respect?

Radical Knowledge Management will do that for you.

Implementing Radical KM addresses a whole host of challenges being face in organisations and really is the silver bullet it appears to be.

ProblemSymptomArts-based Solutions
Uncertainty and exaggerated sense of urgency▸ People are stressed, worried, overwhelmed▸ Support mental health and well-being
▸ Creating space for reflection
No sense of purpose/meaning▸ Disengagement
▸ Connections have been broken
▸ No sense of belonging
▸ No empathy and compassion		▸ Build teams, connections, engagement
▸ Build a sense of belonging
▸ Build/develop empathy and compassion for self and others
Lack of Agency▸ Don’t know what they want, what they can do, what is possible
▸ People starting to think like AI/ computers		▸ Build sense of purpose and meaning, big picture
▸ Create/develop agency
Lack of critical thinking▸ Don’t know who/what to believe
▸ Lack of curiosity and creative problem solving		▸ Critical thinking to discern what is real and what is fake
▸ Support trial and error, and iteration

You can check out my recent ReWorked column for more information or watch this webinar I did with KMI.

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Radical KM Workshop Feedback

I was recently asked to help a university class that was working on a module entitled, “creating, managing and using knowledge in organisations”. The instructor is someone in my network who wanted her students to learn about Radical KM. Due to technical reasons it wasn’t possible for me to lead the session live.

The students watched a recording of a webinar I did about Radical KM and then the instructor lead them through the workshop that I had prepared and sent her. What follows is the email I received back with the classes comments and reflection on the session. I have removed any identifying information for privacy, otherwise what follows is a straight cut and paste.

Hi Stephanie,

I hope this message finds you well. 

On behalf of the class, I just wanted to express our gratitude for preparing today’s workshop. It was a refreshing change for us, and everyone had a lot of fun. I just thought I would summarise our thoughts below:

As in your video seminar, beginning with the flower meditation served as a way to concentrate our focus on the workshop, and allowed us to clear our minds of any other conflicting thoughts. For me, doing this meditation with the class as opposed to on my own, forced me to concentrate more on my flower. However, the collective energy in the room definitely improved since we had all engaged in the same activity to start our day. Some individuals in the class visualised imagery in relation to flowers in their garden or that they had bought as part of a bouquet, linking the meditation to everyday life.

We chose to build a business case for arts-based practices within a law firm, specifically pitching to senior management. In our initial discussion, we decided that this case should be presented by a dedicated KM team, ensuring robust evidence to back up the importance of arts-based practices. We also discussed issues surrounding the use of language like ‘radical’ and ‘creative’, and concluded that the best interests of the law firm should be the primary goal (i.e. billable hours).

The first scribble drawing exercise left us feeling chaotic, energised, surprised and stressed at points. Our stream of consciousness writing exercise following provided an opportunity for us to document our feelings in the moment. For myself, I found that each new scribble drawing that landed in front of me was not what I was expecting. It was very interesting to see how each member of the class interpreted the scribble drawings differently.

Reflecting on this, our following discussion on our business case centred on the benefits of arts-based practices for relaxation, fresh perspectives and taking a break for logical thinking. We added to our business case suggesting that implementing these practices in a law firm would allow for more contribution, an improvement in culture and employees feeling more present. We decided that these practices should be started in a trial so that Senior Management have the opportunity to see how they would fit with practicing law.

The major theme that emerged was nostalgia. It seems that the freedom of a blank piece of paper and an abundance of colouring materials sparked memories of an incredibly tangible time in our lives. I found myself wanting to be very logical with my second scribble. I wanted to make sure that I could definitely fill the page in 5 minutes by choosing the most appropriate pattern – making sure I didn’t run out of time. I am a very logical person when it comes to problem solving so this exercise has prompted me to try and take more creative and abstract approaches in the future.

Our last discussion on our business case led us to decide that Senior Management would just have to try a meditation or scribble method to reveal the true benefits. In our case we would argue that these methods are appropriate as they do not require preparation, promote child-like energy, provide a step away from work and offer personalisation. This way, management could trust that each individual in the organisation is empowered to take arts-based practices and customise it to their needs.

Overall, the class found this a great exercise to implement some of the other ideas we have discussed throughout the semester and truly see them in practice. This was a very insightful an enriching workshop, thanks again!

Kind regards,