There is often a person in every institution who seems to know how everything works.
They know which process to follow, who needs to approve what, where to find a particular document and why a certain decision was made years ago. When something goes wrong, people know who to call.
For a while, this can work.
In fact, it can be one of the things that helps a young or growing organization move quickly. People build experience, solve problems as they arise and develop their own ways of getting things done.
But as an organization grows, the same arrangement can become a vulnerability.
The person who knows how the reporting process works leaves. A new employee joins and has to learn through a series of conversations. A manager goes on leave and suddenly a routine decision cannot be made. Two teams begin following different approaches because there is no shared process to guide them.
Nothing necessarily looks broken from the outside. The organization is still delivering. Projects are being implemented. Teams are meeting deadlines.
But underneath, too much of the organization’s knowledge may be sitting with individuals rather than within the institution itself.
This is one of the less visible forms of institutional capacity gaps.
The issue is not that the organization lacks capable people. It is that individual capability has not been translated into institutional capability.
That distinction becomes increasingly important as organizations grow.
An experienced programme manager may know exactly how to manage a complex project, but what happens when someone else takes over? A finance team may have developed an efficient way of managing information, but is that knowledge documented and accessible beyond the people who created it? A senior leader may carry years of institutional memory, but what happens when the organization needs to make decisions without them?
Strong institutions do not eliminate the importance of individual expertise. They find ways to make that expertise useful beyond the individual.
A process becomes documented and understood by the wider team. Lessons from a project are captured rather than remaining in the heads of those who implemented it. Information is organized so that people can access it when they need it. Roles and responsibilities are clear enough that work does not stop when one person is unavailable.
Over time, knowledge becomes part of how the organization works.
This is also why simply training people does not necessarily solve an institutional capacity gap.
An organization can train twenty employees on a new system, for example, but if there are no clear processes for using it, no ownership for maintaining it and no expectation that the information generated will inform decisions, the training may have little lasting effect.
The knowledge may exist. The institutional capability may not.
The real question is therefore not only, What do our people know?
It is also, How does the organization retain, share and apply what they know?
That question becomes particularly important during periods of change.
A new strategy may require new capabilities. Expansion into another market may expose weaknesses in existing processes. New regulatory requirements may demand better data and reporting systems. Rapid growth may make informal ways of working increasingly difficult to manage.
These moments can reveal whether an organization has built systems that can support its people, or whether its people have been compensating for gaps in the systems.
Institutional resilience is often built in these less visible areas: how decisions are made, how knowledge moves across teams, how processes are improved, how information is stored and used, and how lessons from experience become part of future practice.
The goal is not to turn every organizational activity into a rigid procedure. Institutions need people who can exercise judgement, adapt and respond to circumstances.
But there is a difference between flexibility and dependence on individual memory.
A strong institution should be able to retain what it has learned, even as the people within it change.
That is the shift from individual knowledge to institutional systems: moving from “Sarah knows how to do this” to “This is how we do this, and Sarah’s experience has helped us make the process better.”
It is a subtle shift, but an important one.
Because institutional capacity is not only about having capable people today. It is about building an organization that can retain, apply and build on what its people know tomorrow.