# What is Tribal Knowledge?

> Know-how that lives in people's heads instead of in any document.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary/tribal-knowledge · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

Tribal knowledge is the undocumented understanding of how things actually work, like which customer has a custom setup or why a setting behaves oddly, held by a few long-tenured people.

## Why it matters

It's the reason certain engineers get every escalation, and the reason things slow down when they're on vacation or leave.

## Best practices

1. Capture it from resolved tickets. The answers are already written in old threads.
2. Ask experts to narrate. Record walkthroughs of tricky areas.
3. Reduce the need for it. Systems that can read code and config need less tribal memory.

## How Decimal helps

Decimal learns from resolved tickets and reads the code directly, so knowledge that used to live with one engineer is available on every ticket.

## Related terms

- [Knowledge Base](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/knowledge-base): A library of help articles customers and agents use to answer questions.
- [Internal Note](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/internal-note): A private comment on a ticket, visible to the team but not the customer.
- [Runbook](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/runbook): Step-by-step instructions for handling a known situation.

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