The Ritual of Absolution

We tell ourselves this is knowledge management. It’s not. It’s a ritual of absolution. We create these documents not to communicate, but to prove we did something. The 41-page strategy deck isn’t a guide for the future; it’s a receipt for the 81 hours we spent in meetings. The meticulously detailed project plan isn’t a map; it’s an alibi for when things inevitably go wrong. “It was in the doc,” we’ll say, absolved of responsibility. The document becomes a tombstone marking the spot where a good idea was last seen alive.

The Beautiful Mausoleum

We built a beautiful, searchable mausoleum, complete with tags and a clean UI, but it was still a place where knowledge went to die. It’s a strange thing, this preference for performative knowledge sharing over actual knowledge transfer. It’s like carefully writing down a recipe, laminating it, putting it in a fireproof safe, and then ordering takeout because you can’t be bothered to open the safe. We do this constantly. We reinvent the wheel not because we’re stupid, but because the instructions for the original wheel are locked in a PDF on a server that was decommissioned 11 months ago.

The Specialist’s Brutal Clarity

I have a friend, Drew A., who used to be a retail theft prevention specialist. His world had no room for this nonsense. His “documentation” was a one-page sheet taped to the back of a register, detailing exactly what to do when someone tries to walk out with a television. It wasn’t a philosophical treatise on loss prevention; it was a series of brutally simple commands. Observe. Report. Do not engage. The cost of ambiguity for him wasn’t a missed deadline; it was a lawsuit or an employee getting hurt. His communication had to be absorbed and acted upon in seconds by a 19-year-old on their first job. The stakes were immediate and real.

And that’s the disconnect. In our world, the consequence of a bad document is almost zero. Someone just asks the same question in Slack for the 21st time. The project gets delayed by a week. Nobody bleeds. We are insulated from the cost of our own communication failures, so we have no incentive to improve them. We optimize for archival evidence, not for human comprehension. Drew optimized for comprehension because the alternative was a mess of broken glass and paperwork that cost his company

The Untouched Museum Exhibit

I once spent an entire month building what I believed was the perfect onboarding wiki. I’m talking flowcharts, embedded videos, a glossary with 231 entries. It was a masterpiece of information architecture. I presented it to the leadership team, and I “won” the argument that this would reduce spin-up time by at least 31 percent. It felt like a monumental achievement. A year later, I was screen-sharing with a new hire and asked them to find a specific policy in the wiki. They couldn’t. They’d never even opened it. Their manager had just sent them a series of Slack messages with the bare essentials. My beautiful, logical, comprehensive system was an untouched museum exhibit.

All that effort. All that structure. Useless.

The Container is the Problem

That’s when I realized the problem isn’t the information; it’s the container. The dense, text-based document is a format designed for a world that no longer exists-a world with more time, fewer distractions, and a higher tolerance for friction. Today, sending someone a 21-page document is a passive-aggressive act. It’s a way of transferring accountability without actually transferring knowledge. We’re asking people to stop their frantic multitasking to sit down and read a corporate novel we wrote to cover our backsides. No one has the time or the energy for that.

So the information just sits there, radiating potential energy that will never become kinetic. The solution to a recurring problem, the data that would settle a debate, the logic behind a critical decision-all of it is perfectly preserved and perfectly ignored. The knowledge is solid, but the format is a ghost. It’s a mausoleum for good ideas. Sometimes I think the only way to get this knowledge into people’s heads is to bypass their eyes entirely, to just find an IA que transforma texto em podcast and let them absorb it on their commute or while they’re walking the dog. The friction has to be zero. The act of consumption must be easier than the act of ignoring it.

Living Documents vs. Dead Monuments

I’ve started to think about documents differently. Are they alive or are they dead? A living document is one that people use, edit, and talk about. It’s messy, it’s imperfect, and it’s effective. A dead document is perfect, pristine, and unread. It’s filed away in a folder structure so logical that no human would ever intuitively navigate it. Most of what we create falls into the latter category.

We keep building these digital Alexandria Libraries and then act surprised when they burn down from neglect. The solution isn’t a better filing system. It isn’t a new template with mandatory fields. It’s a fundamental shift in why we write things down. We need to move from creating proof to creating tools. A document should be a lever, not a monument. It should help someone do something, not just prove that we did something. Just like Drew’s one-page guide. Its value wasn’t in its existence; its value was in its immediate, unambiguous utility in a moment of crisis.