Five barriers to capturing what people know

In the first two blogs we established that knowledge loss in NHS Estates and Facilities Management is real, expensive, and specific: the rationale behind decisions, the speed of access to what is already documented, and the relational know-who that makes things happen.

Which raises an uncomfortable question. Every one of the 19 experts we interviewed was aware of the challenge. So why is so little knowledge being captured?

The answers were not encouraging. “I don’t think we actually have a knowledge capture system really,” one Projects Manager told us. A Project Director said “we don’t really have a way of tracking historical data.” A Procurement Specialist reflected: “We don’t do enough to share experiences and have lessons learned with each other as a group of peers.”

Five interconnected barriers explain the gap between knowing and doing.

Barrier 1: It begins with culture

Two cultural dynamics sit underneath everything else. The first is that people systematically undervalue what they know.

“I think people underestimate the value of their experiences, and the sort of time it saves,” one Director of EFM observed, adding: “You don’t realize in time, the value of what you’ve just learned.” Expertise that is embodied and experiential often simply does not feel like an organisational asset to the person holding it.

A consultant with 42 years in the sector identified the conceptual root: “We’ve got to increase that perception of something as being data and therefore needs to be captured in a way where it can be retrieved. But if you don’t perceive it as data in the first place, you don’t know how you got to capture it.”

The second dynamic is fear of candour. Capturing a decision rationale means putting on record that a decision was made, by someone, for reasons that may later look wrong. A consultant with 38 years of experience was scathing about how this plays out: “Lessons learned is a buzz phrase that everybody uses and nobody does. Nobody truly does it.”

Why? “Nobody says anything, because to say something, you’ve got to admit there was a fault, and to say something, you might be actually dropping other people in it. So it’s a pointless exercise.”

The same fear suppresses exactly the documentation that would be most valuable. A Director of EFM explained why non-standard practice goes unrecorded: “You don’t want to be criticized by managers as being lazy or not want to do a hard job.” Underneath it all sits a familiar association: “There’s something cultural there about knowledge is power.”

For a minority, that association is deliberate. “There are definitely some individuals who gatekeep their knowledge because it makes them A) powerful and B) kind of important and indispensable,” the same HR Specialist noted. A consultant recognised the softer version: “people like to see themselves as the expert and not to let go.”

It would be unfair to leave it there, though. Several interviewees pointed to a genuine motivational resource: good, committed people working for the NHS. “It’s not that staff are incapable or are unable to complete these tasks. I think it’s a mindset shift that needs to happen,” one Procurement Specialist said. At least one Director of EFM has already made it: “We don’t have a blame culture. We have a learning culture.”

Culture is the hardest barrier to move and the one that determines whether any of the others can be fixed.

Barrier 2: Capture is an event, not a routine

The second barrier is timing. NHS EFM overwhelmingly treats knowledge capture as something you do when someone is leaving or a project is completed, rather than something you do while work is still in progress.

Handovers are administrative rather than substantive. “There’s maybe a handover meeting, but actually, there’s nothing too formal about it all,” a Project Director told us. An HR Specialist was more specific about what those meetings actually cover: “I would be hesitant to say knowledge capture. […] Predominantly from what I’ve seen, it’s things like, how do you hand your laptop bag in? Have you handed your keys in, etc, those kinds of off boarding procedures.”

Where notes are requested, there is no structure: “there was no standard template. It was up to you to kind of jot down what you thought was maybe pertinent for the next person.”

Even a well-run exit process runs into arithmetic. “You can’t impart 30 years worth of knowledge and information on somebody in two months,” a Director of EFM pointed out. Overlap between outgoing and incoming staff, which would solve much of this, is institutionally resisted.

By the time departure is imminent, it may already be too late. A Projects Manager put it starkly: “You’re trying to capture 40 years worth of knowledge, which is enormous, isn’t it? And sometimes they aren’t even going to remember that knowledge, are they? It’s probably too late.”

This reflects a broader short-termism. “The NHS is particularly bad at doing this. You do one thing, and then you move on to the next project. And you never can properly evaluate it,” an Assistant Director of Innovation observed.

Where knowledge does move, it usually moves in a form that leaves no trace. EFM expertise has always been transmitted vocationally: everything is almost handed down verbally. Mentoring and shadowing work beautifully in the moment and produce nothing the organisation can keep. As one consultant put it: experienced staff “share information verbally then through a conversation. But the point is, it’s not captured, is it?”

Barrier 3: Storage that hides what it holds

Suppose you clear the first two barriers and knowledge does get written down. It then has to survive the storage layer.

“Some of the knowledge is very hard to find. […] Sometimes you will lose that knowledge forever,” an Assistant Director of Innovation warned. Much of the sector relies on legacy infrastructure: “It’s very inefficient, because we are currently working off old drives, in general, Microsoft folders, shared folders, not SharePoint in a cloud,” a Procurement Specialist explained.

Modernising does not automatically help. One consultant’s verdict on search was unprintable in polite company. The deeper problem is not that repositories are old. It is that they are never curated. “Our drives are so convoluted, and there’s years and years worth of information […] some information that’s irrelevant, we need to just delete it,” the same Procurement Specialist said.

A Director of EFM described exactly how decisions vanish: “Within a year, you’ve got 150 sets of meeting minutes. So any derogations agreed in those will disappear into the ether.” Which produces a counterintuitive failure mode: “Information overload can be as bad as no information.”

And when retrieval is slow, people do the rational thing. “We’ll always look for an easy answer. So what’s easier for me? Going over to the guy who’s been here for 30 years and saying: ‘Where’s the isolation valve for Ward four?’, and him 30 seconds, telling me down to the ceiling tile exactly where it is? Or is it easier for me to start trolling the shared drive, looking for the drawings?”

Access speed is not lost because the drawing is missing. It is lost because the drawing is slower to find than the person is to ask. Every hour of retrieval friction is an hour of reinforced dependency on someone who will eventually retire.

Technology adoption in the NHS has not yet closed the gap. “At the moment, there isn’t that opportunity that an AI assistant looks at our own data. It’s physically having to do ourselves to get that information,” one Director of EFM noted.

And the deepest limitation is epistemological. Effective search requires knowing what to search for. As one consultant asked about newly handed-over buildings: “If you’re an operator then, do you know the right questions to ask of the builder or of the design? Quite frankly, no.”

Barrier 4: Silos, absent standards, and contractors

The fourth barrier is structural, and it operates at three levels.

First, fragmentation. “Everybody thinks the NHS is a single entity, but it’s really not. And that makes it problematic in terms of how information and knowledge flow within an organisation and beyond organisational boundaries,” a Knowledge Specialist explained. A Projects Manager described the dynamic between Trusts more bluntly: “Trusts don’t really care about each other, and they don’t like sharing.” The cost of that stance is enormous: “If the NHS could share knowledge, it would be so much more powerful.”

Second, the absence of shared standards. “There is no standard national template for how we would capture that,” an HR Specialist told us. With no standardised approach, every Trust creates its own version.

Here is the twist. A national NHS Knowledge Retention and Transfer Toolkit does exist. Not one interviewee in our study was aware of it, apart from the three knowledge specialists involved in its development. If practitioners are collectively unaware of a standard, it functions, in practice, as if it were not there.

Third, outsourcing. “When we started talking about how to capture the stuff, we were talking about people who worked in house. If you’ve contracted it out, you’re one step removed again,” a consultant explained. Contract boundaries are acute loss moments: when contracts finish, drawings and other data can disappear.

Retendering wipes the slate. A Head of Capital Projects described relationships with contractors who knew local systems, only for the next contract to go to somebody completely new. Some contractors defend the gap deliberately: “We’re the only ones that have the secret codes, because as long as we’re the only ones that have it, you can’t go and give it to another contractor.”

Barrier 5: Time, money, and the paradox underneath

The fifth barrier cuts across all the others, and it is the one everybody reaches for first. “It’s time. Just how much time do we have? […] It’s a constant sort of juggle about where you prioritize your efforts,” an Assistant Director of Innovation said.

A consultant described the reality of the working week: “everyone’s so busy. […] No one at the end of the week is going: ‘Oh, I wonder how can I share this knowledge better?’” A Procurement Specialist described the rhythm of project work as “a constant sort of hamster wheel,” and a Knowledge Specialist explained what happens under deadline: “we need it a week next Tuesday. We just need it finished.”

Money is inseparable from time. “Nobody got a magic money tree in any NHS estate,” a consultant noted. A Director of EFM described the practical consequence: “they didn’t have the money to have a CAFM system that was right for the trust, that was able to capture what we needed to capture.” Even mentoring has a headcount cost.

And here is the paradox at the centre of the whole problem. Knowledge capture is deprioritised because there is no time, when better knowledge capture is precisely what would save time long-term. A Head of Capital Projects described the return: “Whenever you can find that information quickly, it makes it so much so much easier to say to people that this has been decided. It’s been agreed. This was the rationale for this.”

Hours spent searching shared drives, re-reviewing work already reviewed, re-learning what a retired colleague knew, and re-making decisions whose reasoning was never recorded are not small numbers. They are simply spread thinly enough across the year that nobody counts them.

A Procurement Specialist refused to let the constraint stand as a justification. “Although that’s not an excuse,” he noted, before adding: “I think time should be made for that to happen.”

The bigger picture

Read together, these five barriers are not a list of complaints. They are a design brief. Anything that hopes to work in NHS EFM has to demand almost no additional time from people who have none. It has to survive a culture where candour carries professional risk, which means capturing rationale without inviting blame. It has to work continuously during daily operations rather than at the exit interview, because at the exit interview it is already too late.

It has to produce structured output that stays retrievable at speed, faster than walking over to the colleague with thirty years of answers. And it has to travel across Trust boundaries and contract boundaries without depending on a standard nobody has heard of.

That is a demanding brief. It is also a precise one, which is a considerable improvement on where this field has been sitting.

At CompliMind, we are building against exactly these constraints - connecting people, knowledge, and systems so critical insights reach the right hands at the right time. Because the barriers are well understood now and the workforce that holds the answers is not getting any younger.

Want to dig into the details? Read pages 52–61 in the full thesis here.