What Happens When the Person Who Knows Everything Leaves

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There is someone in your business right now who is the single point of failure for your entire technology state. They know where everything is, how it works, and why decisions were made 3 years ago. You almost certainly know exactly who I'm talking about. So, this isn't a technology problem. It's an organizational risk that happens to manifest through technology. Every

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business has this person, the one who gets called when something breaks, who holds the passwords that aren't in the password manager, who remembers why the system was built the way it was, and their knowledge has never been extracted or documented or transferred because there was never a reason to do it while they were there.

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So, why does this happen? Well, because knowledge transfer feels like a project for when someone is leaving, not a process for while they're staying. The institutional knowledge accumulates naturally and invisibly over years.

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Nobody planned to concentrate it in one person. It just happened because they were good at their job, and everyone just let them get on with it. So, here's what you do before it becomes urgent. Set aside 2 hours with that person this quarter.

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Not to document everything, that's way too big, but to answer three questions. If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, what are the three things that would break within a week? What do you know that nobody else in this business knows?

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And what would it take for someone else to be able to cover for you? You don't need a GDPR-compliant knowledge base for this. You just need those three answers written down somewhere.