A reflection on KCS adoption, ego, and what actually makes change stick.
When I started working with Patrick, Knowledge and Lean Manager at the University of Copenhagen, he was trying to scale KCS across an IT department of around 400 people. No dedicated knowledge management team. Limited data visibility. An organization going through a significant administrative reform. And a program that was running more on instinct than evidence.
What made Patrick different was not his situation. Plenty of the organizations I work with face similar conditions. What made him different was how he responded to it.
He asked for help. And then he had both the will and the freedom to act on it.
The thing nobody talks about
I was speaking recently with a former colleague — an experienced program manager — and she made an observation that has stayed with me. She said that the biggest challenge she faces when launching any new program is not budget, or technology, or even organizational resistance. It is seniority.
The more senior a person is, the less likely they are to ask for help — even when they are not the expert. Instead of bringing in someone who knows the territory, they find a way to make the project fit what they already know. They work around their own knowledge gap rather than through it. Sometimes out of pride. Sometimes out of habit. Often without realizing they are doing it at all.
I have seen this pattern derail more KCS programs than any technical or methodological issue. The theory gets implemented. The tool gets selected. The rollout plan gets approved. And then adoption stalls — because the decisions at the top were made by people who were not willing to admit they did not know what good looked like.
Patrick did the opposite.
Carte blanche — and what it takes to give it
When Patrick brought me in, he gave me something I rarely get in full: carte blanche. Not just on the technical design of the program, but on the approach, the sequencing, the coaching model, and the way we engaged with leadership.
That kind of trust does not come easily. And it is not naive — Patrick was not hands-off. He was intensely curious, asked sharp questions, and pushed back when something did not make sense to him. But he did not let ego get in the way of the recommendation. When I said this is what needs to happen, he found a way to make it happen.
What surprised me even more was how quickly that openness spread. Management — who had tried their own approaches before and not seen the results they wanted — were also willing to try something genuinely different. That is not common. Usually there is at least one layer of the organization that resists departing from what they know. Here, the willingness to do things differently was real, at every level.
It created the conditions for real change. And Patrick learned extraordinarily fast.
What the work actually looked like
The visible part of a KCS engagement — the training, the process design, the tooling — is not where the outcome is decided. It is necessary, but it is not the hard part.
The hard part, in this case, was working with KCS Coaches who already had the title but had not yet found a way to make the methodology feel real for their teams. Knowing KCS in theory and knowing how to coach it in the flow of real work are two very different things. A significant part of my time was spent with those coaches — not re-training them, but helping them bridge the gap between what the methodology says and what their teams actually needed to hear.
The other critical piece was building a measurement layer. The program had been running on gut feeling — which, to be fair, is where most start. But gut feeling does not survive organizational change, budget conversations, or leadership transitions. Data does. We built dashboards that gave managers visibility into team performance, gave coaches insight into individual development, and gave leadership a clear line of sight from KCS activity to business outcomes.
That data layer ended up revealing things nobody expected — including a technical bug that was quietly distorting resolution times. The measurement did not just prove KCS was working. It made the whole organization smarter.
Three years later
The results Patrick presented at the Consortium for Service Innovation’s KCS in Action webinar in April 2026 speak to what sustained, people-centered change actually produces:
- First Contact Resolution climbed from 51% to 76%
- Average Time to Resolve dropped from 4.6 days to 1.4 days
- Link rate improved from 18% to 64%
- Link Accuracy was not measured initially but ended up at 97%
But the number I find most meaningful is harder to put on a dashboard. Patrick went from leading a program with no prior large-scale KCS experience, no data, and significant organizational headwinds — to presenting that journey with confidence and clarity to a global audience of knowledge management practitioners.
That is what good coaching is supposed to do.
Watch the full story
Patrick presented the full journey at the Consortium for Service Innovation’s KCS in Action series. You can watch the recording on YouTube — it is one of the more honest accounts of what scaling KCS actually looks like that I have come across.
The Consortium also published a full recap with key takeaways on their website.
If this resonates with where you are right now
Theory is valuable. But experience makes the difference — especially when you are navigating adoption in a complex, changing organization.
If your KCS program is stalling, if knowledge sharing is not sticking, or if you simply want to avoid the mistakes that slow most organizations down — that is exactly what VisionWillow is here for.
Put the ego aside. Ask for help. It is, as Patrick would tell you, the smartest move you can make.
Get in touch to talk about what we could do together.