Distributed Knowledge Reconstruction

Context

An organization needs to document knowledge about a system, process, or domain. The original expert is unavailable, has left, or the knowledge is so embedded they can’t articulate it. But the knowledge has been partially transmitted to others through years of informal collaboration.

Problem

How do you reconstruct complete knowledge when no single person holds it anymore?

Solution

Treat knowledge capture as an aggregation problem rather than an elicitation problem:

1. Map the network: Identify both formal hierarchy and informal collaboration patterns
2. Start broad: Begin with accessible contacts rather than hunting for the expert
3. Follow referrals: When someone says “talk to X about that,” trust the signal
4. Track fragments: Maintain explicit state of what’s known and what’s missing
5. Iterate to convergence: Keep collecting until fragments assemble into coherent whole
6. Validate internally: Use self-consistency checks since ground truth isn’t available

The key insight: knowledge that has spread through an organization retains enough fidelity that fragments can be reassembled, if you can find them all.

Consequences

Benefits:

• Doesn’t require expert availability
• Surfaces knowledge that experts themselves couldn’t articulate (due to curse of expertise)
• Reveals informal knowledge flows (useful organizational intelligence)
• Can achieve high recall (94.9% in simulation studies)

Tradeoffs:

• Requires knowledge to have actually disseminated (won’t work for siloed expertise)
• Quality depends on network connectivity
• More resource-intensive than direct expert interview
• May capture degraded or slightly incorrect versions of original knowledge

Related Patterns

• Expert interview: Direct elicitation when expert is available and articulate
• Documentation archaeology: Reconstructing from written artifacts rather than people
• Community of practice mining: Extracting knowledge from group interactions

Related: 06-molecule—seci-framework, 05-molecule—llm-knowledge-archaeology, 06-atom—tacit-knowledge-definition