“I was doing knowledge audits down south and spent some time with an operational unit which had recently been moved to lovely new warehouse buildings. This was due to the need to have more and more physical workspace to meet the needs of supporting the maintenance and upgrades of the organisations’ core machinery.  I wanted to know how this unit obtained the information they needed, how they learnt how the machinery had performed after delivery, what designs worked best, and what were their preferred ways of working were. With the machinery being operated in Antarctica it was crucial that this machinery be in excellent operating condition as people’s lives depended on it. The problem however, was that the division, in all it’s efforts to support the maintenance of the machinery had forgotten about it’s people. They had removed the tea room to make more room for spare parts etc. Discussions and debate was held with the organisation on the requirements for an IT system that could house all the detailed written plans and processes. This IT system would cost millions. I was pleasantly surprised when the operational unit realised that spending millions on a new IT system was overkill and decided a kitchen table would be sufficient.”