How Many Steps It Takes to Change a Light Bulb?

Nobody would consider using Post-Its an efficient way of keeping track of what someone knows. Imagine having an encyclopedia of Post its. Especially when those yellow little reminder lose their sticky properties, trying to jigsaw them in place would be utter madness.

Why? You’d think the only reply is because it’s plain mental to use such a system – which is true -; but there is also another, surprising, explanation.

It is also because, for the average person, a 2-steps process is the lowest bar that encourages adoption of any system, and using Post-its after they lost their stickiness becomes a multiple one. And especially at work, knowing this, it becomes vital. Crazy, uh?

In any case, that means the issue with using a Post-it system is not IF but WHENsomeone loses information.

For that reason, many companies think that today relying on DMSs (document management systems like ) to keep their documents in one place is the only solution to keep them free from knowledge loss and inefficiencies. But is it really true?

My Boss Knew

It happened on a Monday morning of a couple of years ago. I remember vividly because I needed to finish the Payroll, but I could not go on and my stress levels were particularly high that day.

I was hunched over my laptop, halfway through a task that should’ve taken me twenty minutes, but I couldn’t make it work. Two hours later, I was still stuck (and now silently cursing because I had to also work through my lunch break). I knew there was a way, but couldn’t put the finger on what it was, and I could not remember, for the life of me, what to search for.

I’d tried everything I could think of. Re-read the instructions on my notepad. Checked old emails. Even ran a couple of random searches in my shared drive — which, as usual, brought up 84 versions of the same document, none of them useful, then Slack. Nothing.

Frustrated, I leaned back and rubbed my eyes.

That’s when Fabiana — not me, but my former boss that shared the same name — walked past. She glanced at my screen and said, almost casually: “Oh yeah, I know what it is. I’ll show you quickly. Just flip the order, otherwise the system won’t accept it”.

I blinked. “Wait, what?” I felt like a prized idiot. Just like that, I had wasted 2 hours of my morning searching for something that was right there in front of me, only I didn’t know it was there.

We’ve all heard it. I had just witnessed it. There is someone who knows. My boss knew because she’d been working for years in that department, cursing before me in my position and developed a workaround to make it work.

The Quick Fix

Here’s the problem: That “quick” fix never made it anywhere else. It maybe lived in some Slack DM that I could not find. Or worse, maybe it lived only in Fabiana’s head. Definitively not in any official document.

Multiply that by 100 people across a company, and suddenly you’ve got a giant invisible cost:

• Hours spent rediscovering the same solutions
• Colleagues frustrated because they know the answer is out there, but can’t find it because they do not know where to look for (or what) and who to ask.

It’s not written anywhere official, so you will not find it in any DMS.

It is not malicious — it’s just how humans share knowledge. Informal, fast, person-to-person. But when those people are not present, or when you’re not in the room for the “real quick” lesson, the trail goes cold.

I already shared this memory in a previous article, of that time I had to pick up the pieces of an entire department because our boss had been laid off just days before my return from holidays. Every day I’d run into those micro-gaps: “Oh, she must have dealt with that situation…” – or giant ones – like when a new member in our team got hired and nobody knew about it. The team kept going, but it felt like learning to walk with one shoe missing. Slow, awkward, and unnecessarily painful.

The truth is: “Let me show you quickly” moments are gold. But only if they don’t disappear into thin air.

Imagine if those little gems of know-how naturally became part of the company’s toolkit. Imagine if everyone had immediate, clear visibility of who knows what, without interrupting them every time.

That’s not just efficiency. That’s how companies protect themselves from the hidden costs nobody puts on the balance sheet.

So next time someone says “Let me show you real quick” — ask yourself: how do we make sure this lesson doesn’t vanish?

@Phlow we can help. Book a free demo today.

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