Large-scale scientific and nuclear infrastructures are designed to operate for decades, often longer than a single professional career, and a new open-access study argues that their greatest long-term vulnerability may not be technical failure but the slow erosion of human knowledge. Writing in EPJ Research Infrastructures, Chiara Carrano proposes a Four-Pillar Governance Framework that treats knowledge management and human-factor risk mitigation as structural requirements of governance, co-equal with technical delivery, cost, schedule, and regulatory compliance. The framework integrates four interdependent dimensions: systematic knowledge retention, psychological safety infrastructure, generational and diversity bridging, and management involvement.
The argument rests on a distinctive level of analysis. Carrano distinguishes project-delivery governance, concerned with schedule, cost, quality, and construction risk, from operational and institutional governance, concerned with the multi-decade operating life of an infrastructure. The four-pillar framework is addressed principally to the second domain: it is an architecture for governing knowledge and human-factor risk across the operational lifecycle, not a project-delivery risk-management methodology. Framed through ISO 31000, the loss of critical knowledge becomes a formal governance risk, an effect of uncertainty on objectives, rather than a human-resources concern.
The empirical backbone is a mixed-methods study, drawn from the author’s Executive MBA thesis at EAE Business School and published in 2024, combining quantitative survey data with qualitative interviews among nuclear sector professionals worldwide. Respondents spanned engineering, physics, human resources, project management, legal, and administrative functions, could answer anonymously, and represented a broad range of national and professional profiles. When asked about their preferred methods for capturing tacit knowledge, the majority identified coaching, mentoring, and shadowing programs as the most effective approaches, followed by formal training initiatives.
Two findings from that research stand out. A significant proportion of participants reported difficulty clearly articulating what knowledge management is, despite simultaneously recognizing its practical importance for daily operations and organizational continuity. The study suggests that within highly technical environments, knowledge management is often perceived as an implicit or fragmented practice rather than a formally recognized strategic discipline, an ambiguity that may itself constitute a governance vulnerability. Separately, when participants reflected on the principal difficulties in identifying, capturing, retaining, and transferring critical knowledge, the most recurrent barriers were not technological limitations but organizational and human-related factors, with imbalanced workload distribution, insufficient time, and lack of motivation cited as primary inhibitors. Management support emerged as the highest-ranked factor for achieving effective knowledge management, surpassing resource allocation, role definition, communication initiatives, and departmental involvement.
The concept anchoring the first pillar is critical knowledge, defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency as the minimum knowledge required for a nuclear organization to operate safely and effectively, specifically the knowledge associated with a particular position that incumbents must possess before independently performing related duties. Critical knowledge is position-specific, frequently industry-exclusive, and largely non-substitutable. The IAEA has developed a methodological approach based on evaluation and ranking criteria that helps organizations identify the strategic knowledge they rely on, the individuals critical to continued success, the knowledge at risk of being lost, and the prioritization of mitigation actions, producing what the agency terms a heat map of critical knowledge at risk. Structured mentoring and coaching programs serve as the principal vehicle for tacit knowledge transfer, while succession planning mechanisms initiate transfer proactively, before the departure of critical personnel, guided by the IAEA’s operational roadmap NG-T-7.4 across the full facility lifecycle.
The second pillar addresses the conditions under which knowledge is shared and acted upon. Drawing on Amy Edmondson’s research, which established psychological safety, the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with questions, concerns, mistakes, or ideas, as the single strongest predictor of team learning behavior and operational performance, the framework specifies four mechanisms: blameless reporting environments grounded in Just Culture, structured lessons-learned loops that convert reported events into actionable responses, transparency and accountability mechanisms that reduce blame while preserving accountability for negligent or willful misconduct, and knowledge-sharing cultures that transform individual expertise into organizational capability. The study points to the Boeing 737 MAX crisis as an example of the economic consequences of poor psychological safety and weak safety culture, citing investigations that highlighted organizational barriers to speaking up, employee fears of retaliation, and safety concerns that were not sufficiently escalated; two crashes killed 346 people, the fleet was grounded worldwide, and financial losses were estimated at more than USD 20 billion in direct costs and over USD 60 billion in total economic impact.
The third pillar responds to demographic realities. The progressive retirement of senior specialists creates a critical discontinuity in the transmission of tacit knowledge, which is particularly acute in nuclear and scientific organizations where specialist expertise may take 10 to 20 years to develop fully. When three or more generational cohorts work in parallel, differences in educational background, professional culture, and communication norms can impede collaboration, and the framework prescribes deliberate structures rather than ad hoc accommodation: reverse mentoring that pairs younger employees with senior colleagues for bidirectional transfer, mixed-cohort project teams and intergenerational communities of practice, and avoidance of generational stereotyping. Gender imbalance is treated as a structural risk. According to the 2025 UNESCO factsheet on women in science, only 35 percent of STEM graduates worldwide are women and women represent less than one-third of researchers globally, while the 2024 UNESCO report Changing the Equation found women hold just 22 percent of STEM jobs in G20 countries. IAEA data indicate women make up only 22.4 percent of the nuclear sector workforce, and women hold less than one-tenth of STEM leadership positions globally. Citing Page’s research on cognitive diversity and Duchek and colleagues’ work on resilient teams, the framework argues that homogeneous workforces increase organizational blind spots and constrain adaptive capacity in high-stakes environments.
The fourth pillar elevates management involvement from support function to governance function. The IAEA emphasizes that sustainable knowledge management programs require active managerial sponsorship, dedicated resources, and integration into organizational strategy rather than isolated administrative initiatives, and the agency’s 2025 publication on performance indicators provides methods for assessing the effectiveness of knowledge management initiatives throughout the lifecycle of a nuclear organization. The framework also catalogues risks that operate in isolation and compound systemically: the externalization of competences, where knowledge generated by external collaborators is not systematically captured and risks disappearing at contract end; cultural barriers to error reporting, documented across aviation, healthcare, and nuclear energy; and the undervaluation of intangible assets, which traditional financial statements capture only partially. Research by the McKinsey Global Institute has shown that companies investing most heavily in intangible assets consistently achieve higher productivity growth at the firm, sector, and macroeconomic levels. The study also cites the Pickering A and Bruce A situation in Canada, where divergence between documented procedures and actual operational practice accumulated over decades with direct safety and operational consequences.
The framework’s interdependence logic is structural rather than incidental. A robust knowledge retention system generates the organizational memory that makes safety reporting meaningful, because reports can be contextualized against historical experience. Psychological safety is the cultural condition without which neither knowledge retention nor diversity benefits can be fully realized, since personnel who fear retribution will not share what they know regardless of the sophistication of available capture systems. Generational and diversity bridging expands the cognitive range from which knowledge generation and problem-solving draw, while management involvement provides the enabling condition for all three, because without visible leadership commitment, retention systems, safety cultures, and diversity initiatives will not achieve sufficient organizational traction. Removing any one pillar leaves a governance gap the remaining three cannot compensate for, addressing four distinct failure modes: retention failure, disclosure failure, cognitive-homogeneity failure, and sponsorship failure.
The author is explicit about limits. The proposed causal chain, in which embedding knowledge management within governance structures improves decision quality, strengthens organizational resilience, and reduces operational and safety risk, is treated as a theoretical proposition warranting future empirical validation rather than a tested pathway, and the article states that further validation through comparative case studies and longitudinal research is required. For practitioners, the framework maps onto competencies already formalized in professional standards: the retention and management-involvement pillars align with the technical and leadership domains of the PMI Talent Triangle, and knowledge loss can be treated as a governable risk using the risk-identification and risk-treatment processes of ISO 31000 and ISO 21502, allowing program and portfolio managers to embed the framework into existing project-management offices rather than build a parallel initiative. The central claim is that knowledge is not merely an organizational asset to be protected but the foundational resource upon which future safety, innovation, and institutional continuity ultimately depend.
Subject of Research: A four-pillar governance framework for knowledge management and human-factor risk mitigation in long-term scientific and nuclear infrastructures
Article Title: Reframing Project Governance in Long-Term Scientific Infrastructures: A Four-Pillar Framework for Knowledge Management and Human-Factor Risk Mitigation
Article References: Carrano, C. (2026). Reframing Project Governance in Long-Term Scientific Infrastructures: A Four-Pillar Framework for Knowledge Management and Human-Factor Risk Mitigation. EPJ Research Infrastructures, 10(1), Article 37. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41781-026-00181-8
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1007/s41781-026-00181-8
Keywords: project governance, knowledge management, nuclear sector, psychological safety, tacit knowledge, critical knowledge, IAEA, cognitive diversity, succession planning, organizational resilience, workforce ageing, long-term infrastructure
News Source: Courtney Benton. (November 5, 2026). Knowledge Loss Is a Governance Risk: A Four-Pillar Framework for Multi-Decade Scientific Infrastructures. Scienmag.
