When Knowledge Management Gets Practical: Lessons from Kayla Harrison at Turner Fleischer
The phrase "knowledge management" tends to conjure images of dense academic frameworks, enterprise software rollouts, and organizational policy documents that nobody reads. It sounds formal. It sounds distant. It rarely sounds like something that could quietly shape the way a design studio in Toronto operates day to day. But that is exactly what Kayla Harrison, Knowledge Management Specialist at Turner Fleischer, has demonstrated is possible when the work is grounded in people rather than process.
In a candid conversation with Mark Britz for the Undercurrents series — which surfaces insights from leaders driving capacity-building and performance improvement beyond traditional learning and development — Harrison offered a refreshingly grounded perspective on what knowledge management actually looks like in practice, why the language we use to describe it matters, and what it means to build a learning culture inside a creative organization.
Reframing the Role: From Specialist to Information Professional
When someone asks Kayla Harrison what she does, she rarely leads with her job title. The phrase "Knowledge Management Specialist" is accurate, but it creates distance. It invites people to nod politely and move on. So Harrison has developed a different answer — one that brings the work closer to everyday experience.
She describes herself as an information professional who helps the organization capture, organize, and share its knowledge so that people can make better decisions, innovate, and build on what already exists. That reframing is not just semantics. It is strategy. By describing outcomes rather than function, Harrison immediately connects her role to things people actually care about: working smarter, avoiding repeated mistakes, and finding what they need when they need it.
"I help my organization capture, organize, and share its knowledge so that studio members can make better decisions, innovate, and build on what we already know," she said.
This kind of language shift is a subtle but powerful form of organizational communication. It positions knowledge management not as an IT or HR initiative, but as a service that lives inside workflows, conversations, and the small daily moments where information either flows or gets stuck.
Knowledge Management Is Rarely a Planned Career Path
One of the more interesting threads in Harrison's story is how she arrived at this work. Like many professionals operating at the intersection of learning, information architecture, and organizational design, knowledge management was not something she set out to pursue. It was something she discovered — often by stepping into gaps that nobody else had clearly defined.
This is a pattern that shows up repeatedly across the field. People find themselves drawn to questions about how information flows, why knowledge gets siloed, and what it takes for good ideas to actually travel across an organization. They develop expertise not through a formal credential path, but through curiosity and proximity to real organizational problems.
At Turner Fleischer, a design studio operating in a field where creative and technical knowledge intersects constantly, those questions are especially alive. Architects, designers, and project teams work across complex, long-cycle projects where institutional memory matters enormously. Knowing what worked on a previous project, who has deep expertise in a particular building type, or where the documentation lives for a past client engagement — these are not trivial details. They are competitive advantages.
Where Learning Actually Happens
The Undercurrents series from which this conversation originates is specifically interested in where learning happens beyond the boundaries of traditional learning and development. Harrison's work is a vivid example of that frontier. The most important learning at Turner Fleischer does not happen in a training room or an e-learning module. It happens in the retrieval of a well-organized project archive. It happens when a junior designer finds a precedent study that saves them three days of research. It happens when a team debrief is captured in a way that makes it findable two years later.
This is the quiet infrastructure of organizational intelligence. It does not announce itself. It rarely gets celebrated. But when it breaks down, everyone notices — in duplicated effort, in lost context, in decisions made without access to what the organization already knows.
The Four Pillars of Effective Knowledge Management
Harrison's work at Turner Fleischer aligns closely with what researchers and practitioners describe as the foundational pillars of effective knowledge management. Understanding these pillars helps clarify why the discipline matters and what it looks like when it is done well.
- Capture: The first challenge is getting knowledge out of people's heads and into a form that can be stored and shared. This includes documentation practices, after-action reviews, and structured approaches to recording project insights before they walk out the door with departing employees.
- Organization: Raw information is not knowledge. Organizing content so it is findable, contextual, and structured around how people actually search for things is a discipline in itself — one that sits at the heart of information architecture and taxonomy design.
- Sharing: Even well-organized knowledge is only valuable if people can access it and are encouraged to use it. Culture, trust, and tool design all shape whether knowledge sharing becomes a habit or an afterthought.
- Application: The ultimate goal of knowledge management is not storage — it is use. Knowledge has value when it improves decisions, accelerates work, reduces errors, and helps people build on what already exists rather than starting from scratch.
Why Design Studios Are Ideal Knowledge Management Laboratories
Turner Fleischer is an interesting setting for this kind of work precisely because design studios operate under conditions that stress-test knowledge systems. Projects are long. Teams are fluid. Creative decisions are often implicit and hard to document. Client contexts vary dramatically. And the expertise that makes a studio competitive — its judgment about materials, spatial relationships, regulatory environments, and client communication — is almost entirely tacit.
Tacit knowledge is the hardest kind to manage. It lives in expertise, intuition, and experience. It does not transfer easily through documents. Helping an organization surface and share tacit knowledge requires trust, relationship, and often a facilitator who understands both the content domain and the human dynamics of sharing what you know.
What Organizations Can Learn from Kayla Harrison's Approach
The most transferable insight from Harrison's work is the value of grounding knowledge management in genuine organizational need rather than theoretical best practice. She is not implementing a framework for its own sake. She is asking a simple, powerful question: what do people in this organization need to know, and how can we make sure they can find it?
That question cuts through complexity and connects knowledge management to outcomes that leadership and practitioners alike can recognize and champion. It also positions the knowledge management specialist as a partner in organizational performance — not a back-office archivist, but someone actively shaping how the organization learns and grows.
As more organizations grapple with the costs of knowledge loss, the inefficiencies of siloed expertise, and the limits of formal training programs, the kind of practical, human-centered knowledge management that Kayla Harrison practices at Turner Fleischer offers a compelling model. The work is quiet, but its impact is not. And in a field still searching for its identity, that clarity of purpose may be the most valuable thing of all.