Technique 1.1: Search Early, Search Often

Surfacing existing knowledge through search, recommendations, and other content discovery tools must be built into every knowledge worker workflow. Once there is a clear description of the issue and some environmental context, there is enough signal to begin discovering what is already known.

• Searching early based on the requestor's description of the issue ensures we understand the issue as the requestor sees it and minimizes the risk of investing time in analysis for an issue that has already been solved.
• Searching often is important because as we are working on the issue and learning more about the situation, we need to use the new information to find what we collectively know about this or similar issues.

"Search" here means more than a manual keyword search or natural language query. It includes anything that helps reveal existing knowledge: intelligent suggestions, contextual recommendations, and other emerging content discovery automation.

As new information is gathered, continually revisit content discovery.

• This ensures that we identify any existing or emerging knowledge related to the issue or similar situations. 
• Even when results don’t directly match, they can offer useful perspectives, highlight how others approached similar problems, and suggest clarifying questions.

Before creating new knowledge, it's essential to check what already exists, using all available discovery methods. This avoids duplication and builds on prior work rather than recreating it.