Knowledge Turns

A metric for organizational understanding, modeled on inventory turns from lean manufacturing.

Knowledge doesn’t move on its own. It moves when someone who needs it can find it, recognize it as relevant, and apply it to their current situation — and every one of those steps requires context. Strip the context and knowledge sits. It occupies server space, shows up in knowledge base counts, and does nothing. The organizations with the lowest Knowledge Turns are often the ones with the most knowledge — accumulated across years of undiscriminating capture, never connected to the decisions it was supposed to inform, never updated when its context changed