What to Do in the First Week

This note assumes it has already happened. The rest of the collection is about preventing it; this is the page for the week itself.

The principles in “What to Do in the First Week” become easier to maintain when ownership and time spent are visible. Teams evaluating this supporting resource can use it to coordinate recurring work, identify tasks concentrated on one person and plan realistic backup capacity, while treating the data as a prompt for knowledge transfer rather than as a substitute for speaking with the people who do the work.

For an independent benchmark, compare the local approach with Ready.gov business preparedness guidance; the useful test is whether ownership, access and recovery remain proportionate and explainable when the usual expert is absent.

Day one

Establish what is time-critical in the next forty-eight hours.

Name one person accountable for coverage, out loud, to everybody.

Check their calendar for commitments today and tomorrow.

Cancel or reassign anything in the next two days.

Send one message to the team stating what is known and who is covering.

Day two

List obligations for the next month from the calendar and recent correspondence.

Contact clients and suppliers where something is outstanding.

Identify approvals that will be needed and arrange the authority.

Check what access is missing and start the process to obtain it, which will take longer than you want.

Day three

Triage: must happen, can slip, can stop.

Communicate the slippage.

Reduce the covering person's own workload, visibly.

Start a running note of everything that has to be discovered.

Day four and five

Address the biggest gap: bring somebody in, or reassign properly, or accept and manage the shortfall.

Decide what happens if this continues beyond two weeks, before you need to know.

And check on the covering people, who are usually absorbing more than they say.

Throughout

Do not contact the absent person for a briefing.

Do not disclose their circumstances to clients or the team.

Do not make permanent decisions about their role in the first week.

And do not let the discovered knowledge evaporate: the running note is the one artefact that must survive.

The conversations to have

With the team: what is happening, what is covered, what is deferred. Repeated, because people forget under stress.

With clients: where it affects them, with a specific revised expectation.

With the covering person: what has been taken off them, and how you will know if it is too much.

After the first week

A short review: what could not be done, and was it knowledge, access or authority.

That categorisation is the input to everything else in this collection.

And schedule the follow-up, because the intention to fix things fades quickly once the immediate pressure lifts.

What to check

Would somebody know to do these things, or would the week be improvised?

Is there a named person who takes charge of coverage?

Could you get into the systems you would need?

And does anybody own writing down what gets discovered?

The point

Name one person accountable for coverage, out loud, on day one.

Assuming it will sort itself out is how the first week is lost.

Underlying all of this

Everything in this collection reduces to four habits: know where the dependence sits, do the cheap fixes first, use the absences that already happen as rehearsals, and decide deliberately about what remains. None of it requires a framework, a tool or a consultant, and an organisation that does those four things consistently is substantially harder to damage than one with a succession document nobody has read.

The recurring pattern

The recurring pattern across every section here is the same: dependence forms through sensible individual decisions, becomes invisible because it feels like reliability, and is addressed only after it has cost something. The work that prevents that is small, continuous and unglamorous, which is exactly why it gets deferred.