The process that lives in someone's head.

Every operations team has at least one. Sometimes it's the founder. More often it's the second hire. The person who knows which clients prefer SMS, which suppliers actually deliver on Tuesdays, which "rules" are real and which are folklore.

They're not hoarding it. They genuinely don't notice they're doing it. Five years of small judgement calls compress into intuition, and intuition lives in one head, exactly where it shouldn't be.

How you know it's happening

• 01When this person goes on leave, response times double.
• 02New hires take six weeks to "settle in" — they're actually shadowing.
• 03Decisions get pushed to one Slack thread you can't leave.
• 04The documentation, if it exists, is a 2022 Notion page nobody trusts.

Why we don't solve this with a wiki

Because nobody updates wikis. We've all read this in someone's onboarding email. The reason wikis fail is they're an additional cost that has to be paid every time the process runs. The work doesn't need the wiki — only the next person does.

You can't fix that with discipline. You fix it by making the system itself the documentation. The process runs through the system; the system records what was decided, why, and what happened next. The "wiki" is a side effect.

“The work doesn't need the wiki — only the next person does. You fix that by making the system itself the documentation.”

How we extract it

Day one through three: we sit with the person. Not interviewing — observing. We watch the work happen. Real cases, real exceptions, real "yeah but on Wednesdays we…" moments. We capture the decisions, not the steps.

Days four through eight: we build a thin slice. Just enough to handle the most common path end-to-end. We test it on real work, side-by-side with the human. If our system would have made a different call, we mark it and ask why.

Days nine through twelve: we widen the slice. Add the second-most-common path. Then the long tail of exceptions, one by one, with a clear escalation route for anything we can't confidently handle. The system never pretends to know things it doesn't.

Day thirteen and fourteen: handover. The team — including the person whose head it lived in — runs the system. We watch. We fix the corners. We leave with the docs (which the system mostly wrote itself).

The thing nobody tells you

The hire whose head it lived in is rarely upset. They're relieved. Holding a process in your skull is exhausting. They get to do strategic work again, the work they were probably hired for. The system handles the routine. They handle the cases the system flags. Everybody promotes.