Knowledge Infrastructure

When I talk about Knowledge Flow, I am pointing at the moon.

When I point and say “moon” - you nod because you see the moon and understand my words.

But you are not experiencing the moon. You not jumping around in your space boots, picking up rocks with your Nomex gloves, sticking flags in the moon dust.

When I talk about knowledge, I’m describing an experience.

You won’t get much from reading this book if I point to a concept, like “artifact”, and you think “document”. I’m saying: jump around in your space suit. Touch stuff. Experience it.

All the Light We Can Not See

Here’s the thing that’s really gonna bake your noodle: When I point at the moon, waker of werewolves, you see moonlight. We can sing songs about moonlight.

But there is no moonlight. You are seeing sunlight.

The sun is in your blindspot — but you see it’s impact and call it moon.

Knowledge is like that. It illuminates what we see and reveals what you must infer, deducing from reasoning or evidence*.*

You have blindspots. Every team and organization has them. Our conceptual blindspots make it difficult to discern why we experience what we experience.

Knowledge flow is discovering what you don’t know. I call this the Monkey Cymbals experience. The old-fashioned wind-up toy that would clang.

Like Morpheus tells Neo, “You know something. What you know, you can’t explain. But you feel it. […] Something’s wrong with the world. You don’t know what, but it’s there. Like a splinter in your mind.”

Over the years, I’ve learned to trust my inner monkey cymbals. Sometimes, I’m simply reacting to a change I don’t like. And need a little reassurance.

Sometimes, the situation is heading towards an iceberg. And I need to find a way to bring people’s attention to it. Those moments are when a simple artifact, flowing to the right people, can make all the difference.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You can put the chapter down, the story ends, you go back to daily work land and believe whatever you want to believe.

You continue reading, you stay in Knowledge Flow land and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The Shape of Knowledge

Design is making sense (of things) — Klaus Krippendorff

In Chapter One, I said that knowledge isn’t isn’t something you have or perform, like winning at Jeopardy or passing a coding test, valuable as those things are. Knowledge is something you do.

We’ve all felt exhausted by too many hours in meetings and too little time to focus. This stress is real. I would go way out on a limb as say: if focus is never prioritized, knowledge can not flow.

I don’t mean maker or IC vs manager, worker vs executive. I mean everyone needs time to think.

I confess, I’m biased in this assertion. I’m not an extrovert, I don’t get energized from being with people. I am outgoing, I talk a lot, so this surprises people who know me. I don’t mind spending time with (some) people. But for every hour I spend socially, I need at least three hours alone to recover my focus.

My dear friend Evelyn is an extrovert and she seems like a strange, exotic creature to me. She get exhausted without social time. I feel empathetically exhausted hearing about her holiday house full of people. Her dinners with neighbors. Her adventures with friends.

I recharge only in solitude. Or in shared solitude — joyfully and deeply focused with someone else, side by side. (This is my secret to a happy marriage.) Our holiday tradition is: buy a stack of books, light the fireplace, unplug all devices, and read for a week.

Perhaps people can generate knowledge flow with a fully-booked manager schedules. Perhaps they simply do it in real time, out loud, like improv. They generate artifacts by orchestrating and integrating the people who generate artifacts.

I’m made a dubious face while typing that. Knowing full well that extroverted knowledge flow might simply be in my blindspot.

Regardless, most of us, most of the time:

• Invest time discussing what to do
• Burn energy trying to be understood and manage our reactions (play nice)
• Pay attention to the social dynamics as well as the ideas, reading between the lines as well while seeking an actual solution
• …and leave without more knowledge, just more to do.

I sometimes wish the solution was to go live in a cabin, deep in the woods, surrounded by peace and bird songs. It’s not, at least not full time. Knowledge is not exclusively an individual action. It is something we do together.

When we do it together, knowledge flows (or doesn’t) over the infrastructure we’ve built to sustain it (or not).

That’s what we’ll explore in this chapter.

If our goal is to design an infrastructure that helps us shape time, energy, and attention into meaning, insight, and action … we must first accept that being busy, present, and working harder are not necessarily the road to knowledge.

The Power of Time, Energy and Attention

Time, energy, and attention are not three separate things you can “manage”. They are our battery.

Time is the container, a one-size-fits all situation. Stop all of your attempts to “make time” (unless you are a wizard, or Hermione Granger.) Nobody has more time than you do. Every sunrise, you get what you get.

Energy is the charge, the amount the battery stores. Energy is the variable is worth managing, and it can be systematically improved.

• The quantity of energy depends on our physical state, our health, nutrition, sufficient sleep.
• The quality of our energy depends on our emotional state, the aspect we usually just call “stress”
• Our ability to focus our energy depends on our distractibility and improving the way we think (the brain, like the biceps, benefits from the right kind of exercise and avoiding junk food)
• The power or force of our energy depends on meaning, whether or not we believe in and value what we are doing and why we are doing it.

We don’t have full control over any of these areas. Life includes newborn babies crying at night, relationships ending, financial fluctuations, lay offs, illnesses that makes thinking difficult, moments when we feel adrift, without purpose.

Life also includes new relationships, getting the dream job, doing something you love. Good stress is still stress, it still drains our energy. I believed that if I could just do the work I enjoy most, I’d be the Energizer Bunny. Not so. All effort requires energy, thus is the physics of reality.

The mechanism for managing energy is not, as we’re often taught, control. Attention is the mechanism we need to leverage.

Attention is the current, flowing to whatever you plug into the battery.

Paying attention can simply mean noticing and processing information. This type of attention is great for observation, synthesizing, practicing the core skills.

Focus is the intentional, sustained, and disciplined narrowing of your attention onto a specific shape. Focus is inextricable from energy. The more you apply energy to paying attention, the less energy you have for focus. Every day, we are making tradeoffs between the two. And for most of us, paying external attention wins over having time to think.

I experience the battery fluctuations in high resolution. After decades of efforting to manage my attention, rather than my energy, I was diagnosed with ADHD. As I developed systems that supported my energy, my quality of life has significantly improved. So have my outputs.

Writing this book, for example, is more energizing and less draining than writing my previous book. My current professional role energizes me rather than burns me out. In part because the people I work with are wonderful, but mostly because I plug in differently.

We all, to some extent, suffer from attention deficit. Because:

• attention easily fractures
• hyperfocus is powerful
• context switching is expensive
• stimulation modulates energy (there’s a reason we drink coffee to “wake up” but there are many forms of stimulation, many of which we are chasing without even realizing it)

What we call “busy” is, too often, the current of our attention flowing to places that drain our battery but produce no knowledge.

We hear: Try harder. Work harder. Invest more effort. This is the mantra of modern work culture, especially in the US. Despite most people’s lived experience, across generations.

The goal isn’t to do hard things. The goal is to do difficult things.

The Importance of Being Difficult

Hard work matters — if we mean difficult work.

Hard requires a lot of effort. Difficult also requires effort, along with complex, mental effort.

Everyone’s difficult means something slightly different. Before you leap to the conclusion that I’m reinforcing blue collar vs white collar classism … hard and difficult can exist in everything we do.

We can follow a recipe or we can use recipes to help us understand how good bread gets made. Managing our energy demands that we don’t make everything difficult. (Something I’m learning the hard way.) Instead, we discern where to invest our energy and what value it generates for us.

For example, sustained physical effort is hard for me. Partly because of an autoimmune disorder but mostly because I don’t find it interesting. (Unless “reading snarky science fiction” becomes an Olympic sport.) I love hiking and can happily cover 15 miles in a day. But hiking up a mountain? Pfffft. Only if there’s a delicious dinner and a spa at the top.

Conversely, architecting a technology system is difficult for me. Searching for patterns and constructing meaning. Moving three-dimensional models in my head, while watching, in real time, the patterns that influences it. Looking for leverage points. Uncovering my own blind spots. Listening, talking, writing, modeling, coding, configuring, reconfiguring, while insights collide like asteroids in a galaxy.

Studying the science behind systems to understand what I’m seeing. Partnering with others to help shape our experiences to better generate our goals.

I can do that all day long.

To be clear: There is no hierarchy. I’m not necessarily doing more difficult work than an athlete, a job that requires more knowledge. I’m doing work that requires focusing on different things.

Imagine Tom Brady, the American football player. Let’s say that Tom and I have the same reservoir of energy and our current flows at the same rate.

If I plug into “playing American football”, my result will not be GOAT. True, being a 5”5’ female is a factor. More importantly (for our example), I would expend all of my energy doing hard things but never get to do the difficult things.

Here again is how I described architecting technology systems

I am always moving things around in my mind … a three-dimensional model of how it all fits together, while watching, in real time, the patterns that influences it. Looking for leverage points. Uncovering my own blind spots.
Studying the science behind systems to understand what I’m seeing. Partnering with others to help shape our experiences to better generate our goals.

Tom Brady and I have never chatted, so I can’t say for sure. But I’m fairly sure he would describe his work similarly.

He might remind me, fairly, that I don’t get hit by a 300 pound defensive lineman whenever I get it wrong.

I might remind Tom that he’s never had to transform a monorepo into microservices while defending each configuration recommendation in endless comment threads. I’m guessing, though I might be wrong, he’d prefer to get sacked.

I know that playing American football is hard. I can only, ever, understand through Tom’s knowledge, the ways it is difficult.

If each of us is a battery, together we are a system of batteries. Nodes in a network of partially charged, self-regulating time containers exchanging energy through interaction.

Knowledge flow is not a framework for managing other people’s time, energy and attention. Though that book would likely sell a lot more copies. Knowledge flow is learning and benefitting from other people’s investment of time, energy, and attention. Collectively shaping a system of meaning, insight, and action.

Epistemic Humility: The Fluid in Flow

In complex systems, no individual ever has full visibility. What we call “knowing” is always a local view framed by position, timing, and access.

Even Tom Brady doesn’t know where to throw a football — he reads the view, in real time, shaped by position, timing and access.

A software engineer doesn’t apply coding skills in a generic way, she writes the code that does the thing that matters in her situation. Her understanding of what matters came across a network of other people’s thinking, insight, and (of course) code.

Understanding that our view is limited and impacted by our experience is called epistemic humility.

Epistemic humility isn’t a virtue, a character trait you prioritize because it makes you a good person. This form of humility is simply a property of reality. Knowledge flow physics. An acknowledged design constraint.

When you know that you don’t know … you remember to look and consider, learn, update, adapt … in order to generate knowledge.

The River of Learning

Learning doesn’t just happen in a classroom. Learning is a capacity that expands as you practice changing your own mind. Practice applying all the skills introduced in Chapter 2 to your daily life, rather than contracting your mind around a store of information.

Learning is the entire point of knowledge work. If we avoid limiting it’s definition to passing exams or memorizing dates (though they might be part of the toolset).

What we know is always viewed through a lense distorted by localized input. Therefore, certainly is always suspect.

My colleagues often want (or demand) certainty. Jira tickets that describe exactly what to build, for example. Tickets that don’t include why it matters to build it or how the outcome will impact other people. (Distractions!) Tickets that include very little integration with other people writing code at the same time.

This approach silos the flow of knowledge in order to be efficient or concrete … as if it helps us see the work through a clear, undistorted lense.

In fact, all this does is disable the engineer from integrated his knowledge and experience with the problem he is facing. When code is part of a system that learns, it integrates localized context (the users, the business goal, the technical reality) into the solution. What we push to production becomes greater than the sum of the people involved.

And enables people doing difficult technical tasks to develop in-the-moment solutions that “planning” didn’t reveal.

The Tom Brady Method.

Honestly, this book could simply say: Think well, together. Everything else describes how.

Epistemic humility is the soil in which you grow, and learn all the time. The rest is scaffolding.

Infrastructure.

Alas, this infrastructure is critical for anyone trying to deliver impactful outcomes that make a meaningful difference.

Knowledge Infrastructure

In the next chapter, you’ll read about The Six Dominant Delusions (of Unusual Size). Knowledge flow is consistently blocked by these false ideas about what knowledge is, who has it, and how it should be applied.

You might be thinking, especially if you don’t fit a stereotype of “someone with knowledge”, that epistemic humility holds you back. You might high five that assertion, if you have a role that is perceived as “feelings based” rather than mind or logic based.

This division of skillset, as I said previously, is hogwash. Knowledge is many ways of knowing (this is one of the Six Inconceivable Truths we’ll explore in Chapter 5.) Even Mr. Spock, as the Star Trek franchise matured, needed to practice emotional intelligence.

Before we get into ranting about the delusions, let’s first talk about how they shape knowledge infrastructure.

Artifact Revisited

In Chapter 1, I said that knowledge is an artifact — an object made or modified by human beings that is always subject to revision. It can be discussion, documents, decisions, models, stories, plans, code, policies, diagrams, doodling on napkins.

It is always made up of three parts, whether or not these parts are explicit:

1. A conclusion or assertion: what you believe you know.
2. The reasons that justify it.
3. Context: Localized circumstances that exist right now.

Keep in mind, this is not documentation. When any one of these is missing, implicit, or mismatched, the artifact may still move — but knowledge does not. An artifact isn’t simply captured, written down, modeled or shared … it is crafted.

An artifact (whether written or simply thought) is always defeasible — open to revision. It can only ever express what was visible, legible, and discussable at the moment it was created.

That doesn’t make it wrong — it makes it incomplete.

I’m not sure, to be honest, whether an artifact, by itself, can really be knowledge. I suppose it’s “open to revision” aspect means its in motion. Perhaps.

Regardless, there is a difference between an artifact and an artifact in the flow of knowledge.

This paragraph, for example, existed before you read it. No doubt, I’ve changed it (more than once) as I developed meaning in this chapter.

Reading this now, you might not understand my ideas in exactly the way I mean them. Language is risky business, our lived experiences build worlds of meaning behind the words we use. (If you are in tech, try defining “Agile” with a group of people. You’ll see what I mean.)

Whatever my intended meaning, you (probably) don’t know me. You can’t read between the lines, or hear the inflection in my voice (unless this is the audio book, in which case, the reader may be guessing). You exists in another time, live in another context.

Which is going to change my meaning, whatever I intended it to be.

The journey this chapter took, from my ability to carve out time to write it, to your experiences after you read it — are all part of the flow. And that flow happened over an infrastructure.

Not just the digital publishing infrastructure, the code and the network. But also the invisible epistemic infrastructure that shapes whose knowledge is heard, shared, accepted, and whose is not.

Activity: Make an Artifact

This activity is simple but more difficult than it seems.

Make one artifact. Pick a subject you care about, an idea or suggestion you want people to hear.

Write down:

• Your assertion, what do you want people to hear?
• 3-5 reasons that support it
• A connection to the context. Why does this matter now?

Keep this in your Studio. After some practice, you’ll come back and review it.

The Toll Road

When effort and intelligence are present but learning doesn’t occur, the problem is rarely competence. It is rarely an artifact problem, meaning is likely being conveyed.

It’s infrastructure.

Knowledge does not flow simply because people are competent. It flows because the environment supports attention, reciprocity, memory, and feedback.

Every organization already has knowledge infrastructure — most of it accidental. That infrastructure silently determines what is visible, discussable, and actionable.

Symptoms of poorly-designed infrastructure include:

• A lived experience of doing everything right
• Still feeling stuck, exhausted, gaslit
• Not because of effort or skill
• But because the system makes learning impossible
• Déjà vu decisions - the same patterns repeating despite intervention
• Condescension: being told how to think by people without relevant experience
• One-directional flow: “knowledge” only flows down a social heirarchy
• Gatekeeping: knowledge accepted because of who shared it not the strength of the artifact

When the infrastructure needs repair — people are told to make better artifacts. Change hearts and minds.

This is an insidious form of “work harder”. Driving faster over potholes does not fix the potholes (it makes them worse).

When artifacts drop, decay, or distort, they are expensive to keep in flow. Picking them up and carrying them is called epistemic load.

When reasons don’t exist or don’t travel, epistemic load shifts onto individuals. You are probably very familiar with this. I experience it every, single day.

In response to a well-constructed recommendation, Steve says, “That won’t work.” Then the “yes it will, not it won’t” spins in circles, the decision travels up and down the hierarchy, DMs move like Slack submarines under the surface … until the recommendation is dead in the water.

“That won’t work” isn’t an artifact. There are no reasons justifying it. No context. It is just epistemic weight.

High epistemic load feels like confusion, fatigue, defensiveness, and rework — not because people aren’t working hard, but because the system demands too much sense-making from too few people.

Rather than pay this toll at every erroneous knowledge toll booth — we can invest in improving the infrastructure.

In later chapters, we’ll explore how to do that in much more detail. For now, it’s important to understand that there is an infrastructure and three infrastructure patterns, temporal, relational, and meaning that make knowledge flow challenging.

1. Temporal Infrastructure

Every organization has patterns and structures that reinforce rules about time and attention. Those patterns and structures are a temporal infrastructure.

Is time dynamic, the underpinnings of learning and evolution? Or is it static, complying with direction given and delivering quickly?

Do artifacts accumlate insight about the context? Or are they a strictly governance and point-in-time decisions?

Is there perpetual urgency? Are decisions today interellated with past decisions? Or is there clear discernment between what matters most to do (quickly) and why?

Temporal pressure fragments attention. Artifacts decay when:

• learning-driven feedback arrives too late or not at all
• decisions recur without memory or reasoning
• documents accumulate but learning does not
• urgency overrides reflection and insight
• decisions outlive their context
• there is no system-level memory, artifacts never cross boundaries

Learning is what happens when the temporal infrastructure is dynamic, not simply fast.

Temporal infrastructure creates context — shared knowledge that moves across organizational boundaries and improves a system over time. Without it, we make short term changes that charge us interest in the form of increasingly fragile, concrete systems that can’t’ change.

2. Relational Infrastructure

Every organization has patterns and structures that reinforce rules about reciprocity: the exchange of energy between people Those patterns and structures, who can talk to whom, who is believed, and how decisions move are a relational infrastructure.

Artifacts are interpreted socially. They move over a relational infrastructure that often adds friction and noise. Rather that increase the rate of knowledge flow.

What gets surfaced, interrupted, or ignored?

Who can answer questions and who must defend their answers? Who can ask clarifying questions?

Who decides what has meaning? How is the context defined (and redefined) to shape artifacts?

Who owns artifacts?

Relational power directs attention. Artifacts stall when:

• reasons don’t travel across roles
• decisions travel without reasons
• authority blocks questioning and learning loops
• context is stripped and replaced with “alignment”
• people comply or resist without understanding
• expertise is siloed

Learning happens when the relational infrastructure encourages and supports cross-boundary partnerships.

Relational infrastructure improves the reasons behind action, the load-bearing principles that support an organization’s capacity for doing difficult things. Without it, every group is limited by it’s localized view, and the decisions make by a few individuals. Rather than operating as an emergent system — greater than the sum of it’s parts.

3. Meaning Infrastructure

Every organization has patterns and structures that reinforce rules about what matters, what to pay attention to and when. Those patterns and structures are a meaning infrastructure.

Meaning is:

• semantic: defining the words that describe concepts we care about.
• contextual: what matters most in this circumstance?
• implicit: things we can’t say or do, subjects ignored or derided, that shape meaning without being explicitly defined

Are definitions shared and clarified across boundaries?

Is context mutually defined and experienced across an organization?

Is lived experience integrated into “how we do things” when people point out blindspots?

Is the meaning infrastructure dynamic, changing as people learn together, or is it static, set in stone, reinforcing compliance over discovery?

Meaning misalignment misallocates attention. Artifacts fracture when:

• words mean different things in different places
• context is implicit, assumed or dictated by silo’d agendas
• arguments are actually mismatched problems
• assumptions about what matters stay implicit
• models don’t align and nobody is worried about that

Learning happens when the meaning is experimental and defeasable across the meaning infrastructure.

Meaning infrastructure increases the positive impact and efficiency of decision making. More time, energy, and attention are wasted by the lack of this infrastructure than temporal or relational, which will usually exist even if they aren’t optimized. Meaning is how we map our journey in the midst of complexity. It’s how we get where we are going, together.

Activity: Trace One Artifact in Motion

In this activity, you are looking at existing patterns. Don’t judge or fix or hurry. Just see if you can spot what happens when a artifact is crafted and set in motion.

1. Select one artifact you care about.

It can be any type:

• a recommendation
• decision
• documentation
• Slack thread
• Jira ticket
• a meeting outcome
• a design
• etc

2. Review the artifact.

• What is the assertion?
• What reasons support it?
• What context does it depend on?

Can you discern these things? If not, what do you presume is true?

3. Consider four questions

1. Where did it originate? Who shaped the assertion, reasons, and context?
2. Where did it travel? Across roles, teams, tools, time zones, meetings?
3. Where did meaning degrade? What got lost: assertion, reasons, or context?
4. What filled the gap instead? Assumptions, authority, urgency, narrative, compliance?

For now, make these notes in your Studio. You’ll come back to them later.

Bonus points: do this again with a different artifact.

Now You Are Ready for the Fireswamp

Part One prepared you for the knowledge flow journey. You know what knowledge is and why it matters. You are practicing core skills you’ll need every day. And you understand that artifacts move across an infrastructure and that infrastructure has common patterns that add friction to the process.

Next, we go to the Fireswamp. The where myths about knowledge are part of every system. Some of these delusions will be so familiar, you’ll be surprised to discover they aren’t Real.

The Fireswamp is what it feels like to live inside broken knowledge infrastructure. Where we blame the wrong things. Ignore the right things. And are confused about how to improve the system.

Are you ready?

Once you see them, you can stop fighting reality… and start redesigning it.

We emerge into the truths about knowledge and the paths that lead us there.

First: into the swamp. (Rodents of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.)