How to Capture Knowledge Without Killing It

"As Orr's study shows, executives who want to identify and foster best practices must pay very close attention to the practices as they occur in reality rather than as they are represented in documentation or process designs. Otherwise, they will miss the tacit knowledge produced in improvisation, shared through storytelling, and embedded in the communities that form around those activities. Does that mean process has no importance in this context? Of course not. But the processes that support how people work should be deeply informed by how they already work—not imposed from above by process designers who imagine they understand the work better than they actually do. Armed with a sense of what really happens on the ground, it's possible to design processes that prompt improvisation rather than ones that are blindly prescriptive."
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=1733&sid=0&sid=0&t=innovation
Excerpted from the article "Balancing Act: How to Capture Knowledge Without Killing It" in the Harvard Business Review, May-June 2000 by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid.