Glossary of Team Knowledge Terms
Definitions for concepts in team knowledge management, decision intelligence, and organizational memory.
Meeting Debt
Meeting debt is the accumulated cost of undocumented meeting outcomes: lost decisions, forgotten action items, and re-discussions that waste time. Like technical debt, meeting debt compounds silently until it slows everything down.
Read definitionDecision Decay
Decision decay is the gradual loss of context around past decisions, causing teams to forget why choices were made. Over time, the reasoning behind decisions erodes, leading to reversals, re-debates, and contradictory choices.
Read definitionInstitutional Memory
Institutional memory is the collective knowledge, experiences, and context that an organization accumulates over time. It includes documented decisions, unwritten rules, relationship maps, failure knowledge, and the historical context that shapes how teams operate.
Read definitionKnowledge Half-Life
Knowledge half-life is the rate at which institutional knowledge degrades after the people who hold it leave, change roles, or simply forget. In most organizations, undocumented knowledge loses half its accessibility within 3 to 6 months.
Read definitionTribal Knowledge
Tribal knowledge is the unwritten, informal expertise that exists only in the heads of experienced team members. It includes how things actually get done (vs. official processes), who to ask for what, and lessons learned from past failures that were never documented.
Read definitionContext-Switching Tax
The context-switching tax is the hidden productivity cost of jumping between meetings, tools, and conversations without a shared knowledge system. Knowledge workers spend up to 30% of their day searching for information they have already encountered.
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