Knowledge Management · Operator Playbooks

Playbooks

Practitioner playbooks on knowledge management. Twenty years building and reviving KM at scale — written for the ops manager who inherited the wiki side-of-desk, the team lead trying to make documentation actually stick, and the founder who keeps answering the same question in Slack.

Knowledge Capture
Capturing Tribal Knowledge Before Your Expert Walks Out the Door

The person who knows why the Henderson account invoices differently just gave notice, and you have two weeks to extract a decade. The emergency protocol that actually works — and the zero-dollar system that means the next departure isn't a fire drill.

Tom Christian June 24, 2026 ~9 min read
Findability
The Findable Knowledge Base: Taxonomy & Search for Non-Librarians

Your team has the docs and still can't find them — so they ask you or rebuild the answer. The problem isn't your content, it's findability. The non-librarian's system for organizing, titling, and tagging so answers surface in two searches — and where AI actually helps.

Tom Christian June 19, 2026 ~10 min read
SOPs
How to Write an SOP Your Team Will Actually Follow

You wrote the SOP, it's in a folder, and nobody follows it — and it's not your team's discipline, it's the writing. The six reasons SOPs get ignored, the principles of one people actually use, and the only test that tells you it's done.

Tom Christian June 5, 2026 ~10 min read
Stale Wikis
Your Knowledge Base Is a Graveyard. Here's How to Revive It.

Your wiki isn't dying because your team doesn't care. It's dying because the workflow you inherited was always going to produce a graveyard. The fix: audit by usage, kill duplicates, capture from real activity, let AI watch so humans can decide.

Tom Christian June 3, 2026 ~13 min read
More playbooks publishing weekly.