When a new employee joins, the onboarding process looks pretty much the same everywhere: a buddy, a course, a handbook. Maybe a welcome lunch. Within a few weeks, the basics are covered.

Six months later, that same person is still figuring out how decisions actually get made, who to call when something goes sideways, and what “good work” really looks like at this company. None of that was in the handbook. 

The knowledge that lives in people, not documents

There’s a name for this kind of knowledge: tacit. It’s the knowledge that experienced employees carry around in their heads: the shortcuts, the context, the unwritten rules. The things that never make it into a slide deck or a policy document. When it gets transferred, it usually happens through conversation. 

The 70-20-10 model is a framework developed by researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership in the 1980s. It suggests that most of what we learn at work comes from three sources: doing the job itself (70%), interacting with others (20%), and formal training like courses or workshops (10%). The numbers aren’t meant to be precise. They’re a rough shape, a way of saying that most learning isn’t happening where most organisations spend their training budget.

Formal training is easy to invest in because it’s easy to see. The 20% is harder to pin down, so most organisations leave it to chance.

When everyone worked in the same building, that was fine. The water cooler, the coffee machine, the walk back from a meeting, these were where people actually shared what they knew. Tacit knowledge travelled through proximity without anyone designing for it.

That’s changed. Hybrid work, distributed teams, video calls that end the moment the meeting does: the informal channels that once carried the 20% have narrowed significantly. And most organisations haven’t replaced them with anything. At the same time 58% of workers say that they are holding valuable knowledge that could benefit their coworkers, mainly due to lack of opportunity to share it.

Why meetings are the new opportunity for peer learning

If tacit knowledge transfers through conversation, and most conversations at work now happen in meetings, then meetings are where the 20% either happens or doesn’t.

Most meetings aren’t designed for tacit knowledge sharing. They’re built for formal information delivery, status updates, or decisions, not for drawing out what people actually know. Someone presents, others listen, a few voices dominate, and the collective knowledge in the room stays mostly hidden.

Making peer learning intentional means changing what meetings ask of people. It means creating moments where knowledge surfaces, where someone shares something they’ve figured out, or answers a question in a way that reframes it for the whole group. The mechanism is simpler than it sounds: ask better questions, give everyone a way to answer, and make the responses visible to the room.

What supported peer learning looks like in practice

Imagine a manager running a monthly team meeting after a product launch. Instead of jumping straight to results, they open with a question: What’s one thing you learned this cycle that you wish you’d known at the start?

In a typical discussion, maybe two people answer. With a structured tool that lets everyone respond at once and surfaces a few answers for the group to react to, you get the full range. A junior team member shares a process shortcut that three senior colleagues didn’t know existed. Someone names a customer objection that hadn’t come up in any debrief. The conversation that follows is the 20% in action.

This is what intentional peer learning looks like: not a mentorship programme that fades after the first month, but a repeatable structure inside the meetings that are already happening.

Designing the 20% into your workflow

The good news is that the mechanism doesn’t have to be complicated. The meetings are already happening. The people with the knowledge are already in the room. What’s missing is a structure that draws them out: a question everyone answers, responses made visible, a conversation that follows.

You don’t need a new programme. You need better questions.

Ready to put this into practice? Read our guide on how to run peer learning sessions in your team.