The Cost of What Everyone “Just Knows”

This image is a living example of tribal knowledge done the right way.

You’re standing on top of a Cold Box in Essex Junction, Vermont, during an emergency repair. Time matters. Welders and pipefitters are staging gang boxes, setting machines, and running leads. The footprint is tight. Scaffold is already erected, access is solved, and production is preparing to move. From the outside, it would be easy to assume the hardest parts are already handled.

But something more important is happening in parallel.

While production accelerates, the rescue team pauses.

Brad and Armando are kneeling together, not because they lack experience, but because they have it. Both are trained. Both have worked together before. Both already “know” how rescues work. This is exactly the moment where tribal knowledge becomes dangerous in many environments—the unspoken assumptions, the silent shortcuts, the internal confidence of we’ve done this before.

Instead of relying on memory, they externalize what they know.

They talk through rescue techniques, not in theory, but for this Cold Box, this access point, this scaffold, this day. They identify anchor points. They discuss which gear makes sense and which does not. They walk through victim considerations before anyone ever enters the confined space. Roles are clarified. Protocol is confirmed. Gaps that familiarity could hide are intentionally exposed.

That conversation is tribal knowledge being shared, tested, and verified.

There is nothing flashy about this moment. No hero posture. No urgency theater. Just two professionals translating experience into a shared mental model. They are turning what we usually do into what we will do here. That is the difference between tribal knowledge that protects people and tribal knowledge that quietly puts them at risk.

This image matters because emergency work creates pressure. Pressure tempts teams to skip conversation and lean on memory. Rescue teams understand something many organizations forget: experience is only valuable when it is spoken out loud. Assumed knowledge doesn’t save lives. Shared understanding does.

In this photo, no one is in the confined space yet—and that’s the point. The rescue happens before the rescue is ever needed. The safety is built before the hazard is entered. The knowledge is transferred before it is tested.

Now contrast that with a different story.

Marcus was never trained, even though everyone believed he had been. On paper, his onboarding was complete. He finished the required modules, signed the forms, and sat in meetings where processes were discussed. His managers agreed he was capable, intelligent, and motivated. But beneath the surface, critical knowledge was never shared. There were unwritten rules about how reports were run, how certain clients were handled, and which procedures mattered more in practice than in policy. These details were assumed to be obvious, absorbed through proximity rather than instruction.

When Marcus failed to follow these invisible rules, the consequences arrived quietly. A missed step caused a delay. A misunderstood process created friction. Nothing severe enough to trigger immediate correction, but enough to erode confidence. Conversations began to happen around him instead of with him. Colleagues questioned how he could miss things that felt “obvious.” What they labeled as common sense was not instinct at all—it was tribal knowledge that had never been deliberately transferred.

As pressure mounted, Marcus worked longer hours. He second-guessed decisions. He asked questions carefully, afraid that curiosity would be mistaken for incompetence. Feedback came in fragments, focused on outcomes rather than understanding. What hurt most wasn’t the workload. It was the isolation. He was part of the team in name, yet excluded from the informal network where real knowledge flowed.

Eventually, leadership framed the issue as a performance problem. They questioned his readiness and fit without acknowledging the gaps they had allowed to persist. When Marcus left, the organization expressed disappointment and briefly discussed improving onboarding. What went unsaid was the deeper failure: Marcus had not lacked effort or ability. He had lacked access. The knowledge he needed existed, but it was guarded by assumption instead of shared with intention.

“This is the cost of unhealthy tribal knowledge.”

Tribal knowledge becomes dangerous when it is hidden rather than taught. It creates invisible barriers, punishes curiosity, rewards insiders, and exhausts capable people until they quietly leave. It doesn’t just hurt organizations when someone walks out the door. It hurts people while they are still trying to belong.

The lesson is simple, but demanding. If knowledge is critical, it must be shared. If it matters, it must be taught. When organizations fail to expose and transfer what everyone “just knows,” the cost is not only operational.

It is deeply human.

And the discipline that prevents it—the pause, the conversation, the deliberate sharing—is why everyone goes home.