Hello there, friend!

With this week’s edition, I’m finally switching to what I felt I had to do for quite some time – writing about Notion, as that’s how I make my coin.

Let’s dig in!

What Notion AI is

Last week, Notion released a game-changing feature – the “Q&A” tool (that’s my affiliate link btw), an AI assistant that lets you chat with your workspace. All of your company's knowledge base is now at your fingertips – all you need is to ask.

In my view, this could supercharge anything from knowledge management through decision-making to employee engagement. Here’s why:

The challenge

In the knowledge economy, having access to the right information is essential, but not always easy.

Avoiding inconsistencies in how information is organized throughout your organization is difficult, and even when you succeed the sheer volume of it can still make finding what you need a challenge, especially if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for (and therefore can’t use search).

But with Notion Q&A you get a straightforward chat interface for surfacing any information you need, like the most urgent weekly tasks, guidelines and SOPs, past project reviews, or older content you can reference in your newest piece¹.

Though it might still take some time to get there (the feature is still in beta), the benefits this can unlock are huge.

The promise

I group these benefits into four categories: individual learning, organizational learning, collective decision-making, and employee experience.

Individual learning is the most immediate level, revolving around things like simplifying onboarding and improving adherence to standardized procedures. Even a well-organized workspace takes time to learn to navigate, and a colleague might not always be able to answer right away, but asking an AI assistant is easy and it can get you up to speed in seconds.

Having the confidence that the knowledge you create will actually end up helping somewhere down the road in turn encourages organizational learning. These are the various knowledge management initiatives, from project reviews to writing SOPs, that aim to capture, connect, and expand your company’s knowledge base. Apart from giving you trust in the value of such efforts, Notion Q&A can also make the process more effective by helping you easily build on previous efforts.

This is especially huge nowadays when an average tenure track of employees is just 3.7 years², as that means that there are only a few people that remember the lessons the company learned, say, 5 years ago, and thus the company is likely to repeat them. But with Notion Q&A accessing those lessons becomes a breeze, which can drive better decision-making and planning.

That brings us to the level of collective decision-making. By making it easier to aggregate the perspectives of as many employees as possible and synthesizing them into a couple of main positions, Notion Q&A (and other features of Notion AI) can make it easier to evaluate the arguments and find the best solution. You could thus build a direct line for all participants to contribute to shaping the collective direction, which would improve their agency and engagement, while also helping the organization make better decisions, and documenting the thought process along the way. In other words, leveraging real collective intelligence is easier than ever³.

And last but definitely not least – all of the above could go a long way in enhancing employee experience by helping people get into flow and enjoy feelings of accomplishment.

You see, struggling to access the information you need is frustrating in itself and when you realize how much it’s delaying you from working on the tasks that really matter, it’s hard not to get stressed. And with all the inputs that need processing the cognitive load on modern knowledge workers is already high, so getting stuck on meaningless metawork can push you to a state of overwhelm. Add the perception that you’re working in an organization that’s stuck in its bad ways and never learns and that you can’t do anything about it and you have a recipe for disaster that can ultimately lead to disengagement or burnout.

Having a streamlined workspace that’s easy to use and navigate, on the other hand, can let you get meaningful things done and enjoy your work much more. Working in a company that’s able to learn as a whole takes that even further, and feeling like a valued contributor of a collective intelligence, whose inputs matter for the good of the whole, lets you thrive and contribute at your best.

The call

With the dream painted, let’s wrap up by taking a look at the prerequisites for that – how do you need to change how you use your digital workspace so that it can support you in reaching the outlined goals?

First of all, it seems clear that being able to “talk” with your workspace encourages centralizing information as much as possible into one connected, comprehensive digital headquarters. Even when (not if) all workspace tools release a similar feature, being able to access information about everything through one chatbot is huge.

Let's say you have a roadmap and financial calculations in a Google sheet, your projects in Asana and your internal wiki in Notion. You couldn't ask any one of those chatbots something like "Give me the meeting notes and project reviews of the 5 projects that had the biggest impact on our projected revenue last year", because neither of them has access to all the information.

I think this is where the versatility of Notion becomes its key trump card – though it might not offer as advanced features for certain systems (e.g. project management) as more narrowly focused tools, it covers far more than what would be required to make it viable. And with Q&A, this flexibility can actually unlock use cases that aren’t available for application-specific tools.

Second, as I already hinted at, capturing the knowledge created in your organization, i.e. documenting processes and explicating the knowledge of employees, will become essential, as the quality of the output from Notion Q&A is directly tied to the quality of the information in your workspace. But those who do invest in knowledge management now have a giant force multiplier available, so the ROI of such initiatives will soar, which in turn is likely to make it a necessity for competitiveness.

In summary, while Notion Q&A is still evolving, its potential to transform business operations is undeniable. By making access to information, organizational learning, and overwhelm prevention even easier, it stands to significantly enhance both individual and collective productivity and well-being in the workplace.

Footnotes

1. As the examples indicate, I’m talking about information you have created or at least curated, as Notion Q&A can’t search the web. But this is actually the information that matters the most, and you wouldn’t be able to find it on the web anyway (e.g. info about the projects you’re working on).

2. For private-sector employees in the US according to https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm

3. This could scale even to the level of entire countries (though I obviously don't think that Notion would be the right tool for that). This would follow the efforts that Taiwan has been spearheading around deliberative democracy (please do some research on that)

Reflection

Finally a post that didn’t take me tens of hours to write. I tried to leverage ChatGPT much more, but in the end it’s still probably 95% my own words. For now, it seems that can coach me through the brainstorming process and help me get my thoughts in order, but I still need to do the final editing to feel like it’s really my voice coming through.

That said, I’m really happy with the job it did with summarizing the above into a Linked in post, so here’s the prompt I used for that:

Also, I will have to explore how to write about Notion without sounding too sales-y. Sure, I am basically selling Notion as a tool, but I want to learn how to make it more of a soft-sell “Here’s what I find really cool, maybe you’ll like it too.”
Might be a bit difficult since I’m unavoidably biased as an affiliate and Notion designer, but I still want to try.

And that’s it!

Let me know what made you think, what you liked, and what made you disagree, and I’ll see you here next week!

Cheers

Chris