Your Team's External Brain

Where tribal knowledge becomes retained knowledge

The first time I ever saw a Sharpie, it was in Pop’s hand, and he was writing the date on the garage freezer door at the bottom of a column of dates. At the top of the column was the label “Defrosted”. You could find a similar column of dates on the side of our furnace (labeled “Filter Changed”), on our hot water tank (labeled “Anode Changed”), and even on the top of our lawn mower (labeled “Blade Sharpened”). When a new appliance was added to the house, the date was written somewhere on it. It was a terrific way to make sure that key information was close at hand. And when these Sharpie notes caught your eye, it also served as a reminder of when the next update was needed.

I was reminded of this habit of Pop’s when my sister sent us a picture of what she found when she opened up her water sprinkler timer box: a Sharpie-scribed note from Pop, “INSTLD 9-11-94 JFB”.

Pop left us in 2002. but his notes continue to surprise us … and help us. Once I got past the nostalgia of this memory, I realized that my dad’s Sharpie habit is the earliest example in my life of a key concept: the Team External Brain.

Just as you benefit from having an External Brain¹, your team benefits from having a Team External Brain. In a group setting, it typically goes by a different name. You’ve probably heard it called the team’s “knowledge base.” It is what the team turns to for all the information needed to run the team. Your own family is also a team, and can readily benefit from having a family knowledge base.

What my dad started with Sharpie scribbles on appliances was the analog version of this knowledge base. And my mom managed much of the rest of this analog Family External Brain, in the form of all the documents she stored in file cabinet drawers in her desk.

As Charu and I grew our own family, we began with similar analog systems. But over time our system has become increasingly digital. At this point, we’re probably 90% of the way to an entirely digital system. Here is the Bogdan Family’s External Brain, originally described in my list of the OneNote notebooks I use for my own External Brain¹:

• Bogdan notebook - This is a shared notebook that my whole family uses (yes, I was able to convince them that all of our information in one place is a good idea).

  • Actions, Projects, Someday, and Routines sections - Similar to my own Work notebook, but this is for my family’s work management system, not mine.

  • Family section - This is where we have all information for the family, e.g. house, car, medical, and relevant research family members have done.

  • Family Travel section - We now do enough of our trip planning in OneNote to earn its own section, where we have a page for each trip we’re organizing. We also keep these pages around so that we can refer to them if needed when planning another trip.

Again, the choice of tool here is up to you. Notion, Obsidian, or a large whiteboard. It’s not about which tool you use. It’s about the goal, which is the same as for your own individual External Brain: Use a tool that can capture more of the important details and be readily and reliably recalled, instead of depending on your brain to keep all this stuff straight.

The success of a Team’s External Brain can be measured by how regularly it is leveraged, and how motivated the team is to keep adding to it.