What does it mean that workflow sharing?

Documenting workflows well enough to share them multiplies their value. A workflow that lives only in your head dies with your attention. A workflow shared becomes a reusable asset — for your team, your community, and your future self.

Example: A senior engineer has spent two years refining a deployment workflow: pre-flight checks, staged rollouts, canary monitoring thresholds, rollback criteria. It runs flawlessly — when she runs it. Then she takes a two-week vacation. On day three, the team ships a broken release because nobody else knew the monitoring step existed. It was not in the runbook. It was not in the wiki. It lived in her hands and her habits. When she returns and documents the entire workflow — every step, every decision point, every judgment call annotated with the reasoning behind it — two things happen. The team stops breaking deployments. And three people improve the workflow with ideas she had never considered, because sharing made the process visible and therefore improvable by minds other than hers.

Try this: Select one workflow you have refined through repeated practice — something you do well enough that it feels automatic. Write it out as if you were handing it to a competent colleague who has never done this task before. Include every step, every tool, every decision point, and — critically — the reasoning behind each non-obvious choice. Where you have made context-specific assumptions (your particular tools, your particular environment), mark them explicitly and suggest alternatives. When you finish, read it back as if you were the newcomer receiving it. Note every place where you would be confused, where a step is ambiguous, or where the reasoning is missing. Those gaps are the tacit knowledge you have not yet converted to explicit knowledge. Close them.