Documentation makes the world go round. Definitely appropriate for high-risk must-deliver projects, but not in all contexts. Is it maybe a business fantasy that

Documentation makes the world go round. Definitely appropriate for high-risk must-deliver projects, but not in all contexts. Is it maybe a business fantasy that we can simply juice the talent of a team and bottle it? Where does this idea come from other than good engineering practice? If you work with smart, talented people in a fast moving world it seems, as you say, inevitable that you face the "problem" of tacit knowledge and manage it positively. In Designing Sound (and my lectures on sound design) I researched and wrote about this as "ineffable knowledge". My observation in arts and design through the 90s and early 00s was that we regularly get people who are x100 superstars but they're unable to articulate exactly how they do things and pass that knowledge to others (I was researching this from a UI/UX point of view). That is /talent/ and it's why we value people as more than just interchangeable cogs. Much process knowledge, and crucially problem-solving knowledge in any project will reside in the heads of individuals. (TBF I think the article is more about tacit cultural knowledge within the team as a whole) Sure if we lose key individuals the project is threatened, but on the other hand trying to get them to do a full knowledge dump, such that any replacement would be frictionless, is a fools errand. Treating "information" that way and ignoring people is one-dimensional thinking. So I don't think it's helpful to talk about tacit knowledge itself as "dangerous". What is more dangerous is composing mediocre teams only from replaceable workers and spending too much of their time on documenting as a safety net when they should be pushing forward. Meanwhile a danger is in treating valuable people so badly their continuity is not assured. Far fewer people fall under the proverbial bus than simply leave for better jobs. So we could take the view that over-cautious self-reporting and documenting is a sign of, and attempt to manage, low commitment business attitudes, poor wages, conditions and low job-security.