As the number of Practice Notes on this blog increased, I began consolidating them into a series of larger publications. The idea seemed straightforward:
- Practice Notes would capture individual observations, hypotheses, examples and reflections.
- Publications would then synthesize those notes into coherent narratives for specific purposes and audiences.
Initially, this worked well. However, after producing the first publications, I noticed an unexpected problem.
During the process of writing, I naturally refined explanations, discovered new connections, introduced stronger examples and developed concepts that had not yet appeared in the original Practice Notes.
While the publications improved, the Practice Notes did not. Over time, the two began to diverge.
At first, this appeared to be a documentation problem. The obvious solution was to copy the improvements back into the Practice Notes.
As the number of publications increased, however, this quickly became impractical. Each improvement created new questions. Should it be added to one Practice Note or several? Should existing Practice Notes be rewritten? Should historical notes remain unchanged? Which version now represented the current understanding?
Most importantly:
How do we prevent valuable knowledge from becoming trapped inside publications instead of becoming part of the body of knowledge itself?
This led to an important realization that the real problem was governance.
The Practice Notes and the publications had become two independently evolving representations of the same knowledge. As more publications were created, maintaining consistency between them became increasingly difficult. The framework itself was beginning to drift away from the knowledge it was intended to represent.
This divergence can be understood as framework debt: the growing gap between an evolving body of knowledge and the frameworks, methods and publications intended to express it.
This pattern is not unique to this blog. Many organizations experience the same problem. They maintain methodologies, standards, white papers, training material, consulting guides, presentations and knowledge repositories.
Each begins as a faithful representation of organizational understanding. Over time, they are revised independently. Eventually, nobody can answer with confidence which version is authoritative.
The problem is that knowledge continues to evolve in multiple places without a common source of truth. When this happens, continuity of understanding gradually deteriorates. Organizations inherit artifacts but lose confidence in the knowledge those artifacts are intended to represent.
My approach is this: A living body of knowledge should have a single canonical source. Everything else should be derived from that source.
Within this framework, the Practice Notes constitute the canonical body of knowledge. Each note captures an observation, proposition, example, question or reflection. Published notes remain part of the historical record. Later notes may qualify, supersede or challenge earlier propositions without silently rewriting how the understanding developed.
Collectively, the active Practice Notes and the relationships between them provide the canonical basis from which the current state of understanding is synthesized.
Publications are generated from dated Knowledge Snapshots rather than maintained as independent products. A Knowledge Snapshot freezes the state of the Practice Notes at a particular moment and provides the basis for creating derived publications.
Also feedback generated while reviewing or applying in practice, are first captured as additional Practice Notes. Only after the canonical body of knowledge has evolved is a new Knowledge Snapshot created and the publications regenerated.
In this model:
Practice Notes → Knowledge Snapshot → Publications → Feedback and Learning → New Practice Notes
Knowledge evolves in one place. Everything else is regenerated from that source. This preserves consistency while allowing continuous learning.
Although this governance model emerged while developing this framework, it is not specific to it. Any organization that maintains a conceptual framework, methodology, architecture, operating model or professional body of knowledge faces the same challenge: as understanding evolves, independently maintained representations tend to drift apart.
The governance pattern proposed here addresses that challenge through four principles:
- Maintain a single canonical body of knowledge.
- Publish stable snapshots of that knowledge.
- Generate derivative assets from those snapshots.
- Feed learning back into the canonical source.
This approach changes how a body of knowledge is maintained. Rather than treating publications as the primary assets, it treats them as synthesized representations of a continuously evolving body of knowledge.
The authoritative source is no longer the latest document. It is the canonical collection of Practice Notes from which that document was derived.
As new observations emerge, the body of knowledge evolves first. New publications are then generated from updated Knowledge Snapshots rather than edited independently.
The objective is not to preserve documents. It is to preserve the continuity of understanding that those documents represent.
By maintaining one canonical source and regenerating derivative publications, learning remains cumulative, traceable and consistent over time.
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