Across this state, in water districts and cooperatives, in family firms and county offices, in fire districts and school boards, a large number of people who have held institutions together for decades are approaching the end of their working lives.
They are not leaving one at a time. They joined at similar points and they will leave at similar points, which means what they collectively hold departs as a body rather than as a sequence of individually absorbable losses.
What is at stake is judgment
Not the records, which exist. Not the procedures, which are written. Not the assets, which are inventoried and insured.
What is at stake is the accumulated understanding described throughout this Library: why arrangements exist, what has been tried, which relationships hold and on what basis, how things tend to go here and what usually precedes them going wrong.
That material took decades to build. It exists in individual heads, it has never been asked for, and its holders do not experience it as knowledge — it is simply how things are.
The transfer is happening by default
Nobody has decided that it should not happen. It is not being decided at all, which produces the same outcome.
A retirement gets treated as a scheduling event. The last month is consumed by handover of tasks. Somebody new arrives, learns the procedures, and operates without the reasoning behind them.
Then, some years later, a practice is removed because it looks like habit and the problem it prevented returns. A dead end is rediscovered at full cost. A relationship that ran on an understanding becomes formal and slow. And the institution rebuilds, over a decade, capacity it did not know it was losing.
None of that presents as a knowledge failure. It presents as new people being less capable, which is almost never the actual explanation.
What the state is short of
Two things, and they are related.
People willing to hold responsibility for institutions. The seats are increasingly uncontested, the same members serve additional terms because nobody else will, and the load on those who do serve rises, which makes serving less attractive still.
And any mechanism for moving judgment from those who have it to those who will need it. Institutions inventory equipment with care and treat the transmission of understanding as sentiment, to be marked with a dinner.
Neither shortage is dramatic. Both compound, and both are currently being resolved in the direction of loss.
Four things, none of them large
The remedies available are unglamorous and are within the reach of any individual currently holding a position.
Record what somebody holds before they go. An afternoon, eight questions, a dozen cases in their own words. The method is in the institutional memory chapter and the window closes on a date visible years in advance.
Attach the reasoning as you go. One line recording why a practice exists, kept with the practice. It prevents a successor removing something load-bearing and prevents an obsolete arrangement being preserved by people who dare not touch it.
Give somebody a real decision. Judgment forms only from deciding under consequence and living with the result. An institution that has never let anybody else decide anything has no successor, whatever its plan says.
Ask one capable person, properly. Nearly everybody currently serving was asked by an individual. The supply of people willing to do the asking is the actual constraint.
The cost is borne by whoever acts
The asymmetry this Library returns to repeatedly applies to the whole of this subject.
The person who spends an afternoon recording what a retiring clerk knows receives nothing for it. The board member who insists on succession planning is raising an inconvenient item. The owner who develops a successor is spending time on somebody who will get the credit.
Every one of those decisions costs the person making it and benefits people who will never know a decision was made. There is no mechanism that compensates for this and there is not going to be.
Institutions persist because a relatively small number of people do it anyway.
Where this Library ends
Everything preceding this entry concerns judgment: how it is built, transmitted, exercised under pressure, and held in institutions that outlast the people exercising it.
The question it ends on is whether a particular generation’s judgment, accumulated across drought years and recessions and long stretches of ordinary competence, reaches the people who will need it.
That is not settled at the level of the state. It is settled in individual decisions taken in specific institutions by particular people, in the next several years, mostly without anybody noticing that a decision was being taken at all.
A community whose institutions carry their judgment forward absorbs whatever arrives next. One that lets it retire unharvested relearns the same lessons at full price, and pays for them with resources it could have used for something new.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD