What a Resilient Small Organisation Looks Like

Not a maturity model. A description of an organisation of fifteen people that has done the work, so you can see which parts you are missing.

The principles in “What a Resilient Small Organisation Looks Like” become easier to maintain when ownership and time spent are visible. Teams evaluating work time tracking tools 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 CIPD succession planning guidance; the useful test is whether ownership, access and recovery remain proportionate and explainable when the usual expert is absent.

What exists on paper

A map of who knows what, thirty lines, updated twice a year.

A page per critical activity: what it is for, where things are, what is unusual, who to ask.

Decision records for the dozen arrangements somebody might otherwise reverse without knowing why.

A list of systems and who can access them, separate from the credentials.

And a folder holding bank, insurance, accountant and registration details, known to more than one person.

What is true about access

Everything is on company accounts, not personal ones.

The domain is registered to the organisation and the renewal card belongs to somebody still there.

Two people can generate any two-factor code that matters.

There is a second bank signatory who has actually approved something.

And revoking one person's access is an hour's work from a prepared list.

What is true about people

Every critical activity has a named second person, and a date when they last did it for real.

Each significant client has met two people.

Key suppliers have a second authorised contact.

And the most depended-upon people have taken a full week off without being contacted, within the last year.

What happens at the edges

A planned absence is used as a rehearsal, with a list of what could not be answered and a half-hour review afterwards.

A resignation triggers a named receiver, four handover conversations, and access transferred in the first days rather than the last.

A new hire writes documentation for their own role in their first eight weeks.

And a vacancy is used to redistribute rather than to recreate the previous role.

What is accepted

Some dependencies remain, named as accepted, with a stated reason and a known fallback.

The cheap mitigations have been done even for those.

And the acceptance is reviewed annually against the organisation's current size.

What does not exist

A skills matrix with ratings.

A documentation project.

A succession plan document nobody has read.

A review cycle with owners and dates.

None of the corporate apparatus, because at fifteen people it consumes the effort that should go into the actual work.

The three numbers

Activities with exactly one capable person.

Uninterrupted days off taken by the most depended-upon people.

Access held by one person.

Counted twice a year, on a page, discussed by whoever can act.

The test

If your most depended-upon person did not appear tomorrow, could you name what stops, and is there a written answer for each?

An organisation that can answer that has done the work, whatever else is missing.

The point

The test: if your most depended-upon person did not appear tomorrow, could you name what stops, and is there a written answer for each?.

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.