The Short Version · 2 min read
There's someone on your team who just knows how to do it. They've never written it down because they've never needed to — until the day they're out sick, on vacation, or gone, and nobody else can do it right.
Every team has at least one. The person who knows how the invoices actually get processed, or how the custom orders get flagged before they go to production, or which vendor needs a call instead of an email or nothing gets shipped on time. Nobody decided this knowledge should live only with them — it just accumulated there over years of doing the job. They never wrote it down because they never had a reason to. They just handled it.
The problem surfaces quietly at first. Someone covers for them and does it slightly wrong. A new hire asks a question nobody else can answer. A customer complaint comes in about something that's always worked — except this week, the person who makes it work is on vacation. The process didn't break. It just became visible for the first time.
“The risk isn't that they'll leave. It's that you won't know what you lost until they do.”
Sit down with the person who owns the process — or have them answer this in writing — and try:
“"Walk me through this process as if you were explaining it to someone doing it for the first time. Include every step, every exception you can think of, every time you'd pick up the phone instead of sending an email, and anything that would cause a problem if it was done out of order. Don't clean it up — just get it all out."”
Then paste their response in and follow with:
“"Turn this into a clear, numbered SOP. Keep all the exceptions and judgment calls — don't simplify them out. Flag anything that's unclear or seems like it might be missing a step."”
Pick one process in your business that only one person fully understands. Not the most complex one — the one that would cause the most immediate pain if that person wasn't available tomorrow. Start there. One conversation, one rough transcript, one prompt pass. You don't need a polished manual. You need something written down that isn't in anyone's head.
