# The knowledge that is not written down anywhere Author: Quadra URL: https://quadra-website.matt-madd.chatgpt.site/risorse/articoli/il-sapere-non-scritto Published: 2026-09-18 Updated: 2026-09-18 Language: en Reading time: 4 min In many companies, there is one person everyone asks. As long as they are there, it does not seem like a problem. ## At a glance - When one person is the only point of reference, part of the company’s value exists only in their memory. - Capturing real cases, exceptions and reasoning makes experience shareable without flattening human judgement. - AI can help people find and use this knowledge. The article’s financial examples are illustrative estimates, not client results. In every company with a few years of history, there is someone who knows things. Not the things written in procedures: the others. Why that customer wants packaging a certain way, which supplier needs a reminder the day before, what that noise on line 3 means, which exceptions are allowed and which are not. Often it is the founder. Sometimes it is the workshop manager or technical lead, someone who has been there for twenty years. That knowledge was never written down because there was never any need. They were there. ## What it costs while they are still there The calculation can be made for any company, and it is worth redoing it with your own numbers as you read. Here we use a simplified starting assumption: **a manufacturing company with around 80 employees**, where one person is the reference point for product and process knowledge. This is not a real case; it is a model to put the numbers in order, and the result remains an estimate, not a measurement. Average hourly cost: €20, all-inclusive, with 220 working days a year. **Estimated annual cost · company of 80 people** | Item | Assumption | Hours/year | Cost | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Interruptions to the expert | 10 questions a day, 8 minutes each | 290 | €5,900 | | Waiting time for those asking | An average of 15 minutes of halted work per request | 550 | €11,000 | | Errors made without them | 2 incidents a year, €4,000 each | — | €8,000 | | Total | — | — | around €25,000 | These are conservative assumptions: actual hourly employment costs in Italy, including contributions, range from €22 to €25, and someone interrupted ten times a day usually counts more. It is a silent cost. It has no line in the accounts, appears in no report, and nobody brings it to a meeting, so nobody decides to address it. Things that are not measured never become an agenda item. And this is not even the worst cost. The difficult situation arrives when that person leaves. ## The day they leave Retirement, a long illness, an offer from a competitor. The mechanism is always the same: the company keeps working, but more slowly and with more mistakes, and nobody can say exactly where it broke. Decisions that once took a question now take a meeting. Exceptions they managed from memory become disputes with customers. New hires take months to understand things they used to learn simply by asking. Building a company can take thirty years. Losing its knowledge can take an afternoon. ## The rare questions are the most expensive The ten daily questions are the visible ones. But the knowledge that really matters often concerns things that happen once every two or three years. The material that behaves strangely below a certain temperature. The machine test that has to be done in a precise order. The change agreed verbally with a customer in 2019, never put in a contract but always honoured. Nobody thinks to write these down because they are not routine. And when they recur, the person who was there is gone: the problem is discovered through a mistake, and the error costs as much as a year's interruptions. ## How to bring it out Serious work starts with listening, not technology. For a few weeks, observe what is actually being asked and of whom, collect the answers together with the reasons behind them, and deliberately seek out the rare cases nobody remembers until they happen again. That material then becomes a searchable resource connected to the systems where the company already keeps its data, with sources always visible and a person remaining the checkpoint for new or uncertain answers. This is not a problem a chat interface solves: that knowledge is not on the internet, it is inside the company, and a generic model asked about it will answer anyway, plausibly and incorrectly. The first part takes the longest, and it is also the only part that retains its value regardless of what is built afterwards. ## What changes for the expert This is the point that determines whether the project works or is rejected. Nobody is taking away their profession. What disappears is the ten daily interruptions about things they have explained a hundred times. What remains are the decisions that actually need them: the difficult customer, the new technical choice, the problem nobody has seen before. It is also the only way the project will succeed. If they see it as an attempt to make them replaceable, the project is over before it starts, because only they have the answers it needs. ## The final calculation Around €25,000 a year in an eighty-person company, under conservative assumptions, just for the time. Plus the errors we have not counted, the delayed decisions and the people waiting. And two questions worth more than the figure: if that person were not there tomorrow, how much of what they know would remain in the company? And how many years would it take to reconstruct it? ## Editorial note Note: the figures in this article are estimates based on stated assumptions, not measured results from a client. They illustrate the order of magnitude and should be recalculated using each company's data. Average hourly cost to the company, including contributions, estimated at €20. ## Sources and further reading Quadra editorial analysis; examples are illustrative.