Here's a strong take: most professional services firms are terrible at knowledge management.

I've worked at four firms and consulted for over twenty more. Most firms invest too little in knowledge management and too late, if ever.

The reason is simple. In consulting, client work pays the bills. If a potential client sends an email saying they might want to work with you, you rally the troops. You get 3 to 4 people diverting all their attention to dig into everything you find out about the company and pulling together a top-notch proposal to win the project. I was part of many of these frantic sprints. It's part of the job.

Sometimes you win the projects and it's awesome. But other times, you don't, and you move on. You wait for the next opportunity and repeat the cycle.

But when it comes to having people invest in the underlying knowledge resources that would not only make reacting to these inquiries easier but help create a foundation to make firm growth easier? Most firms just never do it.

My Experience As A "Knowledge Manager"

My first job in consulting was at McKinsey & Company. I worked in the "Knowledge Center" in Boston as a research analyst. I was shocked at how much the firm spent on people like me. I was deeply integrated into the operations practice and involved in a wide range of projects. Some examples:

1. I worked closely with one Partner to deepen our perspective on lean manufacturing, spending two months reading dozens of books on lean manufacturing and helping to craft a more compelling offer to clients.
2. I responded to inquiries from consulting teams staffed across industries as an ad-hoc researcher, and would temporarily join consulting teams, serving as an extra consultant who could go deep on a very narrow topic
3. When projects were completed, I did intensive debrief interviews with client teams and helped codify lessons and takeaways. When we had
4. When potential projects came in, I worked closely with Partners and project leaders to take the best of our thinking and "knowledge" and help them craft persuasive proposals for CEOs and other business leaders

My biggest observation after Mckinsey? This kind of role is nowhere to be found.

Is McKinsey able to charge more and move faster because of this unique capability? I'm not sure. But compared to every other firm I've worked with, it seems that most firms spend far too much time reacting instead of standing for something.

Forgetting to embrace this in my own "solo" work

At McKinsey, I helped create wiki pages and pulled together off-the-shelf research summaries and proposals that Senior Partners were using with clients across the world. I was obsessed with eliminating all repetitive work. At one point, I had automated much of my job, which was awesome, because I was able to get staffed on a couple of projects over a longer period. I was able to do higher-value work.

But working on my own after leaving consulting, I forgot all these principles. I was spending a lot of time writing but didn't spend any time building a personal "knowledge management" system.

That was when I stumbled upon Tiago Forte's "building a second brain" approach. As I read about his digital notetaking strategies, I thought to myself, "I'm a fool!" I had been doing this kind of stuff as a job for years and had worked at firms like McKinsey & BCG that prioritized it but hadn't implemented anything on my own. I was reading books and not capturing the ideas I wanted to explore in my writing.

Quickly, I built my note-taking system. I started capturing ideas that inspired me, using tools like Instapaper, Readwise, Roam, and Kindle Highlights. Every time I wrote something, I would search my "second brain" and discover ideas that I had forgotten, and that helped me go much deeper in my writing. It directly enabled me to write my book, The Pathless Path, which has sold over 50,000 copies and my new book, Good Work, which just launched.

Not to mention helping me write newsletters like this and other content for StrategyU!

More Teams Should Get Serious About Knowledge Management

Today's consultant or professional is flooded with information. Consider that today’s professionals:

• Check email 11x / hour
• Average 199 unread emails
• Waste almost 1 hour of their workday on social media
• 90% say they can’t finish their daily to-do list

Yet, in most companies, if I ask senior leaders what the focus of their employees should be, they say something like "doing better work," or "pleasing the client."

These are great intentions but if you don't have systems and processes that enable that to happen regularly, you are setting up your teams for failure.

One of the biggest mistakes I've seen with most knowledge management offerings is that they are focused on software first, NOT the underlying philosophy.

If we only pick the right software, then everything will work.

Yet, if I dig a couple questions deeper with people, the leaders of professional services firms almost always admit that they have no knowledge management processes and structure.

If I were to make some suggestions, I'd gently nudge a company in the direction of:

• Taking hiring for this kind of role seriously. Often the best execution people for clients are not good knowledge managers. You should look for someone who is obsessed with research, reading, and is good at synthesis.
• Consciously raise the status of those sharing lessons, synthesizing ideas, and sharing broadly across the firm. Promote people that do this ahead of people that only focus on client billings. This is a hard thing to stomach for some leaders but if you want to shift your culture, you need to send this kind of signal to the organization.
• Focus on lowering the friction to sharing. Are there ways to temporarily staff people solely on knowledge management projects? At McKinsey, sometimes a consultant would spend three monthson such a project.
• Think about knowledge management as the way you evolve and grow as a firm. Once you have people and a group focused on codifying what you are actually doing right now, you will start to gain a better understanding of your underlying capabilities. This often leads to new offerings, tools, and ways of explaining your services to clients.

Almost every professional services firm I've worked with firm knows this is an issue but they struggle to take a breath from the constant busyness of client work.

In today's info-dense world, content and fresh thinking is increasingly important. Customer-facing leaders must have a perspective. If you are leading a consulting firm, this means you too.

But without an approach to collecting ideas and building on what you know over time, I've found it's almost impossible to do this.

I'd love to hear any hard won lessons as I am going to write up a deeper dive on this topic

What have you learned?

What are your pain points?

What do you want to try?