This article was first published in Harvard Business Review and is available via subscription.
Sharing knowledge in medium-sized and large companies is a perpetual challenge. Ensuring quality and consistency for a wide array of tasks and functions across numerous locations and regions is often complicated by customizations for specific needs, adaptations for changing circumstances, and employee turnover. The challenges can be further magnified by the difficulties of capturing tacit knowledge and keeping information up to date amid rapid technological change and geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainties.
In response, many companies continue to pursue traditional documentation practices, codifying knowledge in a comprehensive, precise, and perhaps even rigid set of instructions. But for businesses that must be flexible and adaptable, Martin Reeves, Jack Fuller, and Adam Job propose using an evolvable script. It is a concise, modular instruction set that outlines the purpose of a task along with the most critical actions for accomplishing it—and a far more powerful tool.