Knowledge is Power: Managing the Lifeblood of the Design Org
This video is featured in the Knowledge Management playlist.
Summary
Knowledge management (KM) and KM best practices are not discussed as critical skills for DesignOps team members. DesignOps' responsibilities should include the management of tacit and codified UX knowledge. Everyone talks about design systems and insight repositories. Still, those tools only cover a portion of the UX knowledge a DesignOps team needs to create, manage and make available to the organization. DesignOps teams are responsible for creating, managing, and disseminating processes, tools, and artifacts to support the teams involved in delivering design value and impact at scale.
Key Insights
-
•
Explicit knowledge accounts for only about 20% of an organization's institutional knowledge; tacit knowledge makes up the remaining 80%.
-
•
Tacit knowledge sharing is heavily reliant on trust, self-efficacy, IT support, and the knowledge’s degree of tacitness.
-
•
Knowledge managers, contributors, and champions are distinct but essential roles for a successful KM system in design ops.
-
•
Transforming knowledge artifacts into consumable, context-rich knowledge assets increases their usability and impact.
-
•
Effective KM requires addressing both explicit knowledge (documents, systems) and tacit knowledge (experiences, behaviors).
-
•
Activating learning outcomes starts early in the KM process and involves aligning information, skills, motivation, habits, environment, and communication.
-
•
A culture of learning and knowledge stewardship is foundational to sustaining KM efforts within organizations.
-
•
Using existing tools preferred by users lowers barriers to knowledge sharing and ensures higher adoption.
-
•
Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) approaches, like starting with a UX glossary or a community of practice, help teams begin KM without overwhelming resources.
-
•
Tacit knowledge management suffers when organizations fail to assign stewardship roles like gardeners or knowledge tenders to nurture communities.
Notable Quotes
"Most of institutional knowledge is tacit, meaning it’s understood or implied without being stated."
"The more you know, the more you have the ability to make informed decisions and better control events."
"Knowledge management solutions must focus on both the explicit knowledge that can be documented and the tacit knowledge that resides in people’s experiences."
"Trust is a major enabler for tacit knowledge sharing because people must feel safe to be vulnerable and share their knowledge."
"Self-efficacy boosts motivation to share knowledge by increasing confidence in one’s ability to perform that sharing."
"If knowledge is difficult to find or hard to use, then all the great information doesn’t really help anyone."
"Activation isn’t just at the end of the journey; it must be embedded throughout the knowledge management process."
"Building trust should absolutely be a core value for design ops teams aiming to steward knowledge effectively."
"Organizations often forget to assign gardener roles to communities, which causes tacit knowledge sharing efforts to fizzle out quickly."
"Start small by delivering the minimum amount of useful information, like a UX glossary or a single community of practice."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"If you don’t test, you’re relying on opinion, which can drastically degrade the customer experience."
Erin WeigelReal-world lessons to improve your conversion rates
June 26, 2024
"Whenever possible, you should be breaking down your work into specific research projects or topics."
Daniel KorczynskiWhy AI Is Bad at Research (and how to make it actually useful)
March 10, 2026
"Nothing can get done without fostering and building trust."
Kim LenoxLeading Distributed Global Teams
May 20, 2019
"They walked. The locals were most likely right."
Brendan JarvisFraming Tomorrow by Questioning Today
June 8, 2022
"Any change we make in healthcare can mean the difference between life and death, so timing is everything."
Carol MassaDesigning Health: Integrating Service Design, Technology, and Strategy to Transform Patient and Clinician Experiences
December 3, 2024
"A high-level roadmap with now, next, later helped us show we had a plan but kept flexibility for changing priorities."
Dr Chloe SharpUsing Evidence and Collaboration for Setting and Defending Priorities
November 29, 2023
"Always design a thing by considering it in this next largest temporal context — a day in a month, a decade in a century."
Sarah Auslander Betsy Ramaccia Gordon RossInsights Panel
November 18, 2022
"His sigh was just a sigh. It was not a signal of any defect or usability issue to solve."
Susan Simon-DanielsWar Stories LIVE! Susan Simon-Daniels
March 30, 2020
"Previously Alina spent two days fixing styles in Figma; with plugins, she now does it in 30 minutes."
Farid SabitovAutomatization for Large Enterprise Teams
January 8, 2024
