Every firm has them. Two people, sometimes one, who hold a process together through memory and habit. They are usually excellent, they are usually loyal, and they are usually the reason nobody has ever needed to write the process down.
The arrangement works. That is what makes it dangerous. A dependency that visibly fails gets fixed. A dependency that quietly works accumulates for years, and the cost only becomes legible at the exact moment you can least afford it.
Running the test
It takes twenty minutes and no preparation. List your five most important workflows. For each one, name the people who would have to be reachable for it to run normally this week. Then ask, for each workflow, what actually happens if those people are out for five working days.
You are looking for one of four answers.
- It runs. Someone else picks it up from documentation and it proceeds at close to normal speed. Rare, and worth noticing where it is true.
- It runs badly. It continues, more slowly, with errors that get caught later. Common, and manageable.
- It stops and nobody says so. Work queues quietly. Nothing escalates because nobody outside the workflow knows what normal looks like. This is the answer that should concern you most.
- It stops loudly. Clients notice within days. Painful, but at least the firm finds out immediately.
The third answer is the expensive one, because a process that fails silently has already been failing silently in smaller ways.
Why this is not a documentation problem
The obvious response is to write everything down, and firms that reach for that response usually produce a binder nobody opens.
The reason is that the document gets written by the wrong person, at the wrong altitude, from the wrong source. Someone senior writes what the process is supposed to be, in the language of a policy manual, based on an idealised version they last performed three years ago. The result does not match what actually happens, and the first person who follows it discovers that within an hour. After that, the whole category of documentation is quietly filed under things that do not reflect reality.
A procedure that does not match the real work does not just fail to help. It trains your team to ignore procedures, which is worse than never having written one.
What actually reduces the dependency
Write from observation, not from memory
Watch the work happen. Include the workarounds nobody mentions in meetings, because the workarounds are usually where the real knowledge lives. Then have the person who does the job confirm it, in their own words. Reading a procedure should feel like recognition, not instruction.
Start with one workflow, not the library
Firms that attempt a complete documentation programme finish about a fifth of it and abandon the rest. Firms that document the single workflow with the highest concentration of dependency finish it, and then find the second one easier. Narrow scope is not a lack of ambition. It is the reason the work gets completed.
Give it an owner and a review date
Documentation decays. Software changes, a step is added, a client asks for something different, and within two quarters the procedure is subtly wrong. A named owner and a scheduled review is the difference between a living document and an archive.
Test it by having someone else run it
The only real proof is a person who does not normally do the work following the procedure and getting a correct result. Everything before that is a document nobody has stress tested. This step takes an afternoon and it is the one most firms skip.
What this is worth beyond risk. Firms that document their core workflows discover two side effects. Onboarding a new hire gets dramatically faster, and the business becomes more valuable, because a buyer or a partner pays more for an operation that does not depend on two specific people staying.
The version of this that catches people out
The test is usually run against illness and holiday. The scenarios that actually occur are less dramatic and more likely.
Someone goes to four days a week. Someone is promoted and keeps doing their old job informally for a year, badly, in gaps. Someone retires with three months notice, which sounds generous until you try to transfer fifteen years of undocumented judgement inside it. Someone leaves for a competitor, and the handover is polite and thin.
None of those are emergencies. All of them expose the same gap, and the firms that handle them well are simply the ones that had already written the thing down.