With an estimated 70% of a company's knowledge locked in the minds of its workforce, overcoming silos and intentional 'knowledge hiding' is a massive hurdle. How are you and CEF helping them overcome it?

Most organizational knowledge does live in people's heads, and that much is well established. The real challenge begins after that: creating an environment where people are willing and able to share it, learn from one another, and turn individual experience into organizational capability. This matters especially in public institutions such as central banks, ministries of finance and tax administrations. These organizations hold enormous expertise accumulated over years of practice. When an experienced official retires, moves to another post, or simply works in a unit that rarely speaks to the others, critical knowledge is lost or becomes inaccessible to everyone else.

CEF approaches this through the principles of the learning organization. Knowledge management treated mainly as a technology or documentation exercise produces systems that nobody uses. CEF’s attention goes to the conditions that let knowledge move across organizational boundaries. Several of those conditions have to be worked on at the same time. People share what they know when trust and psychological safety make it comfortable to do so. They share across departments and hierarchical levels when collaboration is encouraged and made practical. They learn from peers when communities and networks exist to connect them. They reflect honestly when reflection is applied to successes as well as failures. And all of it depends on whether leaders visibly model and reward the behavior they are asking for. That last condition matters most for knowledge hiding. People do not always hide knowledge because they are unwilling to cooperate. Sometimes their knowledge is their expertise, their status, or even their job security. In other cases, they would share readily and have no time, no incentive and no mechanism for doing so. Telling people to share more is rarely sufficient. Understanding and addressing the organizational conditions that produce the behavior is what makes the difference.

CEF’s aim is to help institutions move from individual learning to team learning and then to organizational learning. Individual expertise becomes collective knowledge through conversation, through peer learning and mentoring, and through communities of practice and after-action reviews that capture what was learned while it is still fresh.

The goal is not to capture everything held in people's heads, which would be neither achievable nor desirable. It is to ensure that critical knowledge reaches the right people at the right moment, and that the institution learns continuously from its own experience. When that happens, knowledge management stops being an additional task asked of already busy people. It becomes part of how the institution does its work and learns from it.

Trust has been a central theme throughout your research. Why is trust still the missing ingredient in many reform efforts, and how can leaders build a culture where people willingly share knowledge and learn from one another?

Trust is often the missing ingredient in reform efforts because organizations tend to focus first on structures, processes and technology, while paying much less attention to the human conditions that make any of it work. I like to describe trust as the lubricant of knowledge sharing and knowledge flow. You can have excellent systems, sophisticated platforms and well-designed processes, but if people do not trust one another or the organization, knowledge will still not flow as it should.

Two kinds of trust are at work here, and they behave quite differently. Interpersonal trust exists between people. Do I trust my colleague enough to share an idea that is not yet fully formed? Can I admit that I do not know something and ask for help? Can I talk about a mistake without fearing judgment, and do I believe that my colleague will use what I share responsibly and give me appropriate recognition? This kind of trust is fundamental for collaboration, for peer learning and mentoring, and above all for sharing the tacit and experiential knowledge that never reaches a document.

Organizational trust is people's trust in the institution itself, in its leadership, its systems and its culture. Employees may trust their colleagues and still not trust their organization. They ask themselves: "If I speak openly about a failure, will it be used against me? Does management really want us to share across departments, when we are still evaluated on individual and departmental performance? Is it safe to challenge an established practice?"

For leaders, building a knowledge-sharing culture therefore means working at both levels. They need to create occasions for people to interact, learn together and develop trust in one another. They also need to build trust in the institution through transparency, through fairness, and through consistency between what they say and what they do.

Leaders also have to model the behavior they want to see. A leader who says "I don't know, let's find out," who shares openly what a mistake taught her, and who recognizes the people who help others learn, sends a powerful message about what the organization actually values. This matters most for becoming a learning organization. Organizational learning asks people to question established practice, to experiment, and to turn individual experience into collective knowledge. Very little of that happens in a low-trust environment. So trust should not be treated as a soft issue sitting alongside organizational reform. It is part of the infrastructure that makes reform possible. When trust rises, the friction around sharing falls, knowledge moves more freely, and the institution becomes far more capable of learning from its own experience.

Public finance is traditionally risk-averse, yet your recent work champions digital transformation and organizational agility in an era of "business as disrupted". How can public sector professionals in South East and East Europe bridge the gap between strict regulatory compliance and the rapid, flexible adaptation demanded by modern technologies, especially AI?

Compliance and agility can hold together and treating them as opposites is a large part of what keeps public institutions slow. Central banks, ministries of finance and tax administrations carry obligations that private organizations rarely face to the same degree, and public trust is the one on which every mandate rests. Those obligations hold firm. Rigor about principles is compatible with flexibility about method. How we work, how we learn and how we improve can all change while the principles stay where they are. We operate now in what we call an era of business as disrupted. Disruption has become the ordinary operating environment, technological and geopolitical and societal at once, and AI is accelerating all of it. The capacity to keep learning and adapting is becoming a core institutional capability in its own right.

The bridge between compliance and agility is responsible experimentation joined to organizational learning. An institution can transform gradually. It can create protected space for experiment: pilots, regulatory sandboxes, small cross-functional projects with a defined scope. Inside clear boundaries, people can test an approach, learn from the result, and scale what proves itself. This asks for a shift from failure avoidance toward intelligent learning. In public finance some failures carry serious consequences, and pretending otherwise would be irresponsible. The distinction that matters is between failure in critical operations, which stays unacceptable, and small controlled experiments whose entire purpose is to learn something before anything goes to scale.

AI raises the stakes on this capability. Institutions should not be asking which AI technology to adopt. They should be asking what organizational capability they need in order to keep learning how to use AI responsibly and well. That question cannot be answered inside one department. IT, legal and compliance, and the subject-matter experts who know the actual work all have to learn together, which is why AI transformation is an organizational learning challenge with a technological one inside it. Leaders set the conditions. They define the guardrails, naming clearly what cannot be compromised, and then give teams real autonomy inside those boundaries to experiment, question established practice and share what they learn. The principle is compact: firm on principles and guardrails, agile in learning and execution. Institutions that understand and apply the principles of organizational learning will be the best equipped to take full advantage of AI.

As the Managing Director of IKI-SEA in Bangkok, you operate at the heart of Southeast Asia's rapid growth. What is one unexpected parallel or insight from Thailand’s innovation ecosystem that could inspire public institutions in South East and East Europe as they navigate their own paths toward modernization and EU accession?

The insight I would offer is that constraint can be a source of innovation in its own right. In Thailand, and across Southeast Asia more generally, organizations work with limited budgets, uneven infrastructure and very diverse users. Those conditions push people to experiment with what is already available, to adapt what exists, and to learn as they go.

The clearest example I can point to is PromptPay. The Bank of Thailand launched it at the end of 2016 as part of a national payments plan. It lets anyone move money using a mobile number or a national identification number as the address, with no fee on transfers made through a phone. By 2025 it was handling more than 27 billion transactions a year in a country of about 66 million people, which works out at over 400 payments per person. It reached the small everyday payments where cash is hardest to displace.

The reason it worked is the interesting part. Thailand had thin card infrastructure at the time, so there was no incumbent system whose economics needed protecting. The constraint created the opening, and that is precisely the part that gets lost when a practice is copied without being understood. Organizational learning asks for absorbing knowledge from outside, testing it against what the institution already knows, and producing something that fits its own environment. Copying skips the middle step, which is exactly where the learning would have happened. There is a mindset behind this as well. In fast-moving environments, waiting for complete information before acting has its own cost. Starting small, learning quickly from the result, and scaling what proves itself is often the more prudent course.

The lesson from Thailand is that constraints can stimulate innovation, and that modernization often asks for a more curious and resourceful organization before it asks for a more sophisticated solution. So the question I would put to public institutions working through modernization and EU accession is how a proven practice can be adapted to local conditions, which is a harder question than which practice to adopt. That shift from adopting to learning is what makes modernization hold.