Tribal knowledge

Tribal knowledge is know-how that exists only inside a team's shared experience rather than in any document: the workarounds, warnings, and reasons behind how work actually gets done.

It is the answer someone gives when you ask why a process has an odd extra step, or which client must never be moved to the new billing flow. Nothing is written down because everyone who needs it already knows, which is exactly why it disappears when the team changes.

The term is contested. Some organisations avoid it because it borrows from the language of indigenous peoples, and use institutional knowledge, undocumented knowledge, or team knowledge instead. If your company has a style guide, follow it. The underlying problem is the same whichever label you use.

Capturing it has to happen where the work happens. Asking people to write down everything they know produces very little, because they cannot see which parts of their knowledge nobody else holds. MindKeepr finds those parts by looking for decisions and context that only one person has ever touched, then routes a short question about each one to a named colleague with a deadline.