Leverage Maps: Knowledge Hoarding and Knowledge Curation
An evaluation of when knowledge documentation and transfer is appropriate.
Picture this: Your company’s CI/CD pipelines run flawlessly. There’s just one catch. Only Sarah knows how everything actually works. She built the system over three years, understands every quirk, and can debug any issue. The day-to-day operations run fine, but everyone wonders: what happens if Sarah leaves?
This raises an uncomfortable question most engineering teams face: When does expert knowledge become a liability? Is Sarah being irresponsible, or simply prioritizing effectively?
Hoarding vs. Curation
Knowledge hoarding is deliberately withholding critical information, often for job security. It creates organizational fragility and team dependencies.
Knowledge curation involves strategically organizing and transferring information to maximize team effectiveness. It’s thoughtfully deciding what knowledge needs preservation and how to transfer expertise without creating information dumps.
The tricky part is that sometimes undocumented knowledge is curation in action.
When Knowledge “Hoarding” Makes Sense
Job Security in Hostile Environments
If transferring knowledge would result in immediate termination, especially with no severance or notice, delaying or refusing to transfer knowledge becomes self-preservation. When livelihoods are at stake, knowledge protection can be a justified survival strategy.
Scope and Compensation Mismatches
Knowledge outside your job description creates legitimate boundaries. If you’re a backend engineer who learned DevOps, you’re not obligated to become the team’s infrastructure expert at your current salary. Protecting expertise that should be compensated differently is professional boundary setting.
Quality Control
Sometimes centralization of knowledge serves genuine safety purposes. A senior backend engineer limiting database migration authority might prevent data corruption from inexperienced team members. Critical systems often require gatekeeping for reliability.
Strategic Knowledge Curation
Good curation goes beyond writing documentation. It requires understanding what information serves the team versus what creates noise or dependency.
Information That Shouldn’t Be Documented
Rapidly changing information often creates more problems than solutions. Teams waste time updating stale docs or follow outdated procedures. Some knowledge should remain adaptable in human memory.
Some knowledge can’t be learned from documentation. For example, complex troubleshooting or debugging requires hands-on experience and mentorship.
Focus Management
Strategic filtering of information protects teams from information overload. A technical lead who handles vendor communications may not be hoarding. Instead, they may be managing their team’s cognitive load.
Consider Sarah again. If she documented every configuration detail, she might harm productivity. Backend developers forced to understand pipeline internals could lose sight of their primary deliverables. Sometimes concentration allows others to focus on core competencies.
When Curation Gets Mistaken for Hoarding
The Overloaded Team Problem
On consistently overloaded teams, documentation naturally takes lower priority than meeting deliverables. When engineers are firefighting, knowledge transfer becomes impractical. Others may interpret this as deliberate withholding when it’s simply triage.
Management Misdiagnosis
When managers mistake resource constraints for hoarding, they may worsen the problem. Instead of clearing up bandwidth for team members to transfer knowledge or have dedicated mentoring time, criticizing a team member misses the core issue and burns trust.
Building Systems That Encourage Curation
Creating Space for Knowledge Work
Teams need explicit bandwidth for documentation, cross-training, and mentoring. Build these into sprint planning and performance reviews rather than treating them as optional extras. Knowledge transfer should be valued and measured, not relegated to “spare time.”
Rewarding the Right Behaviors
Organizations often punish knowledge sharing by rewarding individual heroics over team capability building. If promotion emphasizes personal achievement over team development, you’ll get hoarding. If crisis response gets more recognition than prevention, you’ll get systems requiring heroics.
Sustainable curation requires rewarding engineers who build others’ capabilities and create systems that don’t need constant expert intervention. Part of this means including knowledge transfer and mentoring as part of performance and promotion criteria.
Engineering the Culture
Knowledge sharing requires admitting ignorance, which feels risky in competitive environments. Teams need safety to ask questions and acknowledge gaps without career penalties. Having office hours, designated channels, or structured mentoring can make expertise accessible while preserving expert productivity.
The Path Forward
The goal isn’t eliminating knowledge concentration but making it strategic rather than defensive.
For individuals: Distinguish between legitimate boundary setting and defensive hoarding. Protect expertise outside your role as necessary, but share knowledge serving team effectiveness.
For managers: Recognize that concentration often results from constraints and not malice. Create explicit time and incentives for sharing.
For organizations: Design systems rewarding curation over hoarding through compensation valuing mentoring and performance metrics including team development.
Sarah might be the symptom of an organization not creating sustainable knowledge-sharing conditions. The most effective teams aren’t where everyone knows everything, but where knowledge is strategically distributed and systematically transferable when needed.
Cheers,
Gilberto Guadiana
This essay is part of Leverage Maps. It’s a series on designing leverage inside companies from systems to strategy to structure. If you’ve seen this loop play out in your organization, for better or worse, I’d love to hear your story.