What belongs in a runbook and what never will — drawing the boundary of the codifiable is a management problem and not a writing problem

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SOPs keep a plant running at 3 a.m. with whoever is on shift — and that reliability is exactly the ceiling of codified knowledge The manual documents the explicit half of the job and quietly misses the other half Wikipedia is the largest explicit knowledge base ever built yet most of what your company runs on lives in chat threads and heads Losing the wiki is annoying; losing the person who wrote it is a different class of disaster Nonaka's SECI model maps the round trip: tacit insight gets externalized into documents and re-internalized through practice Knowledge management systems keep failing for the same reason: they try to capture what was never articulable in the first place Communities of practice exist precisely because tacit knowledge moves only through participation and shared work Version-controlled documentation is an attempt to make organizational knowledge survive employee turnover AI trained on documents inherits everything written and none of the feel: Polanyi's paradox is now a scaling problem When a veteran engineer retires twenty years of unwritten judgment walks out the door — and no offboarding checklist catches it