The joke that is not a joke
Ask any small team what happens when Marta takes two weeks off. Everyone laughs. Then somebody says «we survive», and the laugh gets a little thinner.
Marta is not hoarding anything. She has simply been there longest, and the business has quietly organised itself around what she remembers. Every question without an obvious answer ends up at her desk.
That is a risk, and it is also a ceiling.
The business cannot grow past what one person can be asked in a day.
What actually lives in there
The important thing is that it is never the stuff in the manual. The manual has the process. Marta has the judgment:
- Which supplier says two days and means four
- What to say to the client who always pushes back on the first number
- The discount she can give without asking anyone
- Which jobs look profitable and are not
- Why you stopped doing it the other way in 2023
None of this was ever written down, because none of it felt like a rule when it was learned. It accumulated.
Why the big document fails
The instinct is to sit Marta down and have her write everything. It fails every time, for three reasons:
- It takes weeks she does not have
- It goes stale within a month, because it was a snapshot
- Nobody reads two hundred pages when they have a question right now — they walk over and ask Marta
Writing it down is not the same as making it usable.
The document is a container; what you need is an answer at the moment of the question.
Capture it as it happens
Record the answer once
The next time somebody asks Marta something and she answers, that answer gets captured. Two minutes, in her words, while the context is fresh. The trigger is the question, not a calendar invite.
Put it where the question gets asked
A folder nobody opens is the same as nothing. It has to surface in the chat where people ask, in the tool they already use, in the reply that gets drafted for them.
Let it answer for itself
The third person with that question does not need Marta. And if it is wrong or out of date, they say so and it gets corrected — so the knowledge improves instead of decaying.
Step 2 is the whole difference
It is what separates a knowledge system from a filing cabinet. Same content, opposite outcome.
What to capture first
| Start with | Leave for later |
|---|---|
| Questions asked more than once a week | Anything about a specific person |
| Decisions with a rule behind them: discounts, priorities, exceptions | Anything that changes monthly |
| The reasons behind «we don't do it that way» | Anything relevant to one client only |
That third row is the most valuable and the most likely to be lost, because nobody thinks to ask.
What to leave alone entirely
- Relationships — who to call, and how they like to be approached
- The read on whether a client is about to become a problem
- Anything involving somebody's performance or pay
Say the trade out loud
Capturing the routine frees Marta for these. Say it to the team — otherwise «we are documenting your knowledge» sounds like «we are replacing you», and cooperation evaporates.
Want to start?
We do a free Process Diagnosis: we find where your business is one holiday away from a problem, and show you the first ten answers worth capturing. No cost, no commitment.