Mapping Who Knows What

You cannot reduce dependence you have not located. The exercise below is deliberately crude, because an elaborate version does not get done.

Once the minimum record described in “Mapping Who Knows What” is defined, the practical challenge is keeping it current as work changes. A coordinator can use workload reporting tools to plan review time, compare the effort attached to recurring processes and identify work that still depends on one person, without confusing activity visibility with proof that the underlying knowledge has actually been transferred.

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.

The list

Down the left: the things your organisation does that would hurt if they stopped for a week.

Not tasks. Outcomes and obligations: payroll goes out, the monthly report reaches the client, the machine gets serviced, invoices get raised, the regulator gets its return.

Fifteen to thirty lines for most small organisations.

The columns

Who does it now.

Who else could, today, without being told anything.

Who could with a day's briefing.

And — the column people leave out — where the knowledge lives if neither of the last two is anybody.

That fourth column is where the map earns its keep: "in Sarah's head" is a different answer from "in the shared folder", and both are different from "nobody knows".

Doing it

Alone first, in thirty minutes, from memory.

Then with one or two other people, who will add things you forgot and correct things you were wrong about.

The corrections are the valuable part. People consistently believe tasks are more widely understood than they are.

Reading it

Count the rows where the second and third columns are both empty.

That number is your exposure and it is usually higher than expected.

Then look at whether those rows cluster on one person, which is the difference between several manageable gaps and one serious one.

What surprises people

How many obligations have no second person at all.

How often the answer is "the founder", including for things the founder thought they had delegated.

And how many rows involve access rather than skill: the task is simple and only one person can log in, which is the cheapest category to fix.

Keeping it useful

Revisit it twice a year, or after anybody joins or leaves.

Fifteen minutes to update.

And keep it somewhere more than one person can reach, which is a small joke that is also the point.

What not to do

Do not turn it into a skills matrix with ratings. The corporate version consumes weeks and produces a document nobody reads.

Do not make it comprehensive. Thirty lines you act on beats two hundred you do not.

And do not circulate it as a document about individuals, which changes how honestly people answer.

What to check

Do you have any written picture of who knows what?

How many of your critical activities have exactly one person who can do them?

Do those cluster on one individual?

And how many gaps are about access rather than knowledge?

The point

The fourth column is what makes the map useful: where the knowledge lives if nobody else can do it.

In one person's head is a different answer from in the shared folder.

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.