You know something exists - a document, a decision, a hard-won insight - but you can't find it. Or you’re not sure it’s current. Or it never made it beyond the person who first understood it.
So the team slows down. Someone duplicates work. A new hire struggles. An old idea's lost.
These are common symptoms when knowledge is treated as something to store, rather than something that moves.
in this post, we're going to look at some solutions, deep solutions, that address the problems from a pattern and practice lens. I developed the core patterns for NTEN's 2025 Nonprofit Technology Conference, in a session called Activate Your Nonprofit Knowledge
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Most knowledge hub projects start with structure and tools. What platform should we use? What folders do we need? Where should this live?
But knowledge isn’t something that sits on a shelf, waiting to be accessed. It emerges in context, in time, through interaction.
“The first radical consequence [of quantum theory] is that to attribute properties to something when it does not interact is superfluous and may be misleading. It is talking about something that has no meaning, for there are no properties outside of interactions.”
Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland
Rovelli is talking about the biggest small of things - the fundamental nature of the universe -but the analogy applies. Knowledge doesn’t have fixed meaning. It becomes useful when it meets a moment, a need, a relationship.
“Actors are more likely to base their search into the past on what they want to achieve in the future… They are not actually looking at the past per se, but at something from the past that they think might be useful to investigate with the future in mind.”
Tor Hernes, Organization and Time
This is what I mean by a living knowledge hub: not a static archive, but a responsive system. One that reflects relationships, decision-making, reflection, and change.
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A lot of organizations start by choosing a platform - Notion (choose Coda), SharePoint, Confluence - and trying to fill it with everything they’ve written. The intention is good. The team wants to be more organized, more aligned, more clear.
But the structure doesn’t stick. The hub becomes outdated, unused, or overloaded. What’s missing isn’t information, it’s meaning and intentionality.
I don't think I'm making this up. The insight comes out of my years of working on knowledge hub projects and asking why so many don’t work, even when the people building them are thoughtful and well-intentioned. Again and again, the same issues show up: misalignment between strategy and day-to-day work, knowledge frozen in static formats, and a lack of shared practices for updating and reflecting (and unsurprisingly a lack of buy-in from the people who have to use it, which usually comes down to a misunderstanding of its value.)
One of the early pieces of work that helped shift my thinking was a research project with a mission-led organization focused on systems-level social and economic development on the island of Montserrat. Rather than arriving with assumptions or predefined tools, we spent time listening, mapping the local political, social, and business structures, and meeting with community leaders to understand what mattered most to them. The goal was to support efforts already in motion, not impose new frameworks from the outside. That work, and others that followed, reinforced a simple truth: tools follow meaning. If you don’t understand how knowledge flows through your people, your tech choices will always underdeliver.
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These patterns are grounded in practice, and inspired by the design philosophy of Christopher Alexander, whose work on pattern languages shapes the way architects and systems thinkers approach complexity. Alexander writes:
“Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
These patterns aren’t steps. They’re ways of seeing. Use them to understand what’s working, what’s stuck, and what might be redesigned to better support the flow of knowledge in your team (see below for more on the How.)
How should we incentivize knowledge sharing?
Don't incentivize knowledge sharing.
Incentivize knowledge seeking and sharing will follow.
Milton & Lambe, The Knowledge Manager's Handbook
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Use one pattern as a lens to explore your current system.
Use the patterns to understand a specific issue you're facing.
Start a reflective conversation using this post.
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This is the core of how I work: helping organizations think in patterns, understand how knowledge flows through their people, and desiging small, meaningful changes that support learning and clarity at every level.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
📬 Email me: andy@morningstrategy.ca
🌐 Learn more: morningstrategy.ca
You already know more than you think. Let’s help that knowledge move.