Knowledge Hyperinflation - by Govert Doedijns - Partner

What Happens to Leadership When Knowledge Stops Being Scarce ?

For much of modern business history, knowledge was scarce.

Expertise took years to build. Access to information was uneven. Professional advantage often came from knowing more than others, seeing more than others, or having access to sources others could not reach.

That world has not disappeared. But it is being fundamentally altered.

The internet made knowledge searchable. Smartphones made it immediate. Generative AI is now making competent cognitive output abundant, scalable, and increasingly frictionless. Answers, summaries, analyses, comparisons, arguments, drafts, code, plans and recommendations can be produced at a speed and scale that no traditional professional system was designed around.

This does not mean expertise no longer matters.

It means the value of expertise is changing.

When knowledge becomes abundant, the scarce capability is no longer simply knowing. It is judgment: the ability to interpret context, distinguish signal from noise, ask better questions, make responsible decisions, and stand behind them when certainty arrives too late.

To address this topic, we are publishing a number of articles by our Partner Govert Doedijns. This is the first