Nothing You Develop Is Wasted, Unless You Lose It

Employees spend about 21 percent of their working time searching for information and another 14 percent recreating work that already exists, according to Bloomfire's 2025 Value of Enterprise Intelligence report. That is more than a third of the work week spent finding or rebuilding work the organization has already paid for.

The most expensive version of that loss follows work that did not go forward. A bid is lost, a program is cancelled, a product is paused, a strategy changes direction. The research, the analysis, and the relationships built along the way are written off as sunk cost. The folder is closed, the team moves on, and within a year no one remembers what was learned or where it is.

In Mali, we were well into preparing a bid for a health financing program when the client cancelled the opportunity, as clients often do when budgets or priorities change. The strategies had been developed with local organizations, and the thinking was sound. We kept it. In discussions with the client, we were able to fold that work into a program we were already running. The funding was smaller, but the work was used, and junior colleagues published their research, raising the company's profile in health financing. Work that looked wasted kept paying off.

Tina Seelig makes a related point in her Crash Course on Creativity, which I took through Stanford: knowledge is the toolbox for your imagination. She distinguishes puzzle builders from quilt makers. Puzzle builders work from the picture on the box, and when a piece is missing, they stop. Quilt makers take whatever is at hand and make something new from it. Organizations can work either way. But a quilt maker can only use the fabric in the room, and an organization that wants to work like one faces the same limit: it can only recombine what it can find.

Why good work gets lost

No one decides to lose good work. It happens because no one's job description includes keeping work that stopped. Attention and credit go to the next project, and a cancelled one carries a faint sense of failure that no one is eager to revisit. Seelig observes that how an organization treats failure says a great deal about its culture, and that the strongest treat it as data. A cancelled project is data. Meanwhile, the material itself sits in personal drives and inboxes, and it leaves with the people who created it: a 2018 survey by Panopto and YouGov found that 42 percent of what an employee knows about their job is known only to them.

Why a shared drive does not solve it

The usual response is a shared drive, and most organizations already have one. Storage is not retrieval. A drive full of folders named "final_v3" is an archive only its authors can navigate, and often not even them. What matters most is the context around the file: why a decision was made, what was tested and did not work, and who knows the rest.

What works: treat past work as inventory

End every project with a short record, including the ones that stop early. Note what was produced, what was learned, where it is stored, and who knows more. Stopped work deserves the same attention as finished work, because it is more likely to be forgotten.

Organize for retrieval. Keep it in one location, with consistent names and tags by topic, sector, and type of work, so that someone who was not there can find it in minutes.

Record the reasoning, not only the result. A strategy document without the analysis behind it cannot be adapted. The reasoning is what lets the work travel to a new context.

Look back before starting from zero. In proposal work, this is standard discipline: every new proposal starts from the library of past ones, won or lost. Make it a step in your own process. Before any new initiative, ask what the organization has already built that applies.

This is also where AI changes the economics. A well-organized archive can now be searched, summarized, and compared in seconds. A disorganized one stays just as inaccessible, and grows larger every month.

The question to ask first

What has your organization built in the last three years that it could not find today? The answer is a measure of how much it has paid for twice.

Stopping a project is not the same as wasting it. Work is only wasted when it is lost.

VLC Advisory helps growing organizations build the systems that keep their knowledge working for them. If you suspect some of your best work is sitting in a closed folder, I would welcome the conversation.

Sources

Bloomfire 2025 Value of Enterprise Intelligence report (currently via HBR sponsored piece https://hbr.org/sponsored/2025/04/how-knowledge-mismanagement-is-costing-your-company-millions );

Panopto/YouGov 2018 (https://www.panopto.com/company/news/inefficient-knowledge-sharing-costs-large-businesses-47-million-per-year/).