The Knowledge Flow.
Exploring how the endless streams of knowledge shape — and sometimes distort — our sense of expertise and understanding.
The world of work has established clear boundaries over time. One of them is called the expertise divide.
You are an expert. You know stuff. The world of academia may even have recognised it with the “doctor” title you can append to your name. Some colleagues are even in awe of the depth and breadth of your knowledge. There’s validation all around you.
You are not an expert. You know stuff, though, but not as much.
Let me let you in on a secret. AI will make this boundary disappear. As mentioned previously, expertise is on the cusp of drastic changes.
I think it’s worth exploring what’s ahead – and how it’s generating opportunities.
From scarcity to abundance
Data is the new oil. That’s what they say.
But unlike oil, data isn’t a finite resource. Quite the contrary. It’s growing by the second.
Like oil, data sets things in motion. It creates movement. Insights. Knowledge.
Unlike oil, when data is shared, it multiplies rather than depletes.
In tomorrow’s world of work, owning knowledge has no value. It certainly gives a head start, but it is not sustainable.
The real value – for companies and workers alike – is to trigger the next movement of this knowledge. The next correlation with a data set. The next contextualisation of an insight.
Welcome to a world of work where knowledge flows.
And in such a world, hoarding knowledge is not power: it’s irrelevance.
Knowledge hoarding: a dead strategy
That shift – from guarding knowledge to letting it flow – is a radical departure from where we are. But it will decide who thrives in the age of AI.
Knowledge today doesn’t just sit still: it evaporates.
What’s considered cutting-edge one quarter can be obsolete the next. Clients’ priorities evolve, people change, technology advances.
In a world where AI can instantly retrieve and synthesise information at scale, the mere possession of facts no longer confers power.
The real leverage lies in what happens after the knowledge is surfaced: how it’s interpreted, recombined, and applied in context.
Like oil, knowledge must flow through networks, be refined through collaboration, and fuel new insights. Otherwise, it clogs the system. Teams. Companies. Trade.
Knowledge flow as the new advantage
As knowledge flows, hoarding it becomes a losing strategy.
The moment you try to keep insights to yourself, you slow down not only your own work, but the collective intelligence of your team.
In contrast, those who actively share, annotate, and contextualise what they know create compounding value: they turn static knowledge into actionable insight, and insight into innovation.
These collaborators not only connect data dots – that’s what putting knowledge or information in context is about – but they also make company-wide interactions a lot smoother. And science backs this up: a recent 2024 study found that higher levels of team perspective-taking are linked to stronger trust, reflexivity, and ultimately collective thriving in innovation teams. In other words, sharing knowledge doesn’t just speed up workflows: it strengthens the human fabric of collaboration.
If sharing is caring, sharing knowledge is fluidifying.
AI tools come in to accelerate this dynamic, making it clear that the edge no longer belongs to the keeper of information, but to the orchestrator of knowledge flow.
This shift to knowledge flow is liberating. Our edge lies not in hoarding what we know, but in how generously and creatively we move it through networks. Yet here’s the paradox: the more knowledge flows, the more isolated we often feel.
That tension is where the real story of human augmentation begins.