"We know how to do it!"

"We know how to do it."

"Great! Can you show me?"

"Well no, not right now. The person who knows how to do it is not available right now."

"Oh? So you don't know how to do it, then?"

"No, we know how to do it!"

Many organisations are artificial entities whose purpose is to help us organise and distribute work. But make no mistake, it is people who do the work. To assign an individual's competence to the competence of the organisation as a whole is a dangerous fallacy.

We cannot claim that we know how to do X, if that X depends on a few individuals. That is an especially dangerous claim if the competence of X disappears with those same individuals.

I see this thinking quite prevalent with knowledge work, which both strategising and innovating are a form of. If we want do develop organisational competence, then we must strive to document activities and procedures involved with the respective practices.

This is how we develop reusable knowledge that we can build on, together. And thus, our claim that we know how to it becomes stronger, allowing us to strengthen the organisation as a whole.