Somebody who holds thirty years of an institution’s understanding is retiring in eleven months. The organization intends to capture what they know and has no method, so it will produce a task handover and lose everything else.
What follows is a method. It takes one afternoon per person, requires no expertise, and can be done by anybody willing to sit and type.
Set it up correctly
Do it early. Twelve to eighteen months before departure, not in the final fortnight when everything is consumed by transition logistics.
Say what it is for. We are recording what you know so the people who come after do not have to relearn it. Framed that way people give it willingly. Framed as an exit process, they give the safe version.
Two to three hours, in their space, one session. Longer produces fatigue and shorter produces only the obvious material, which arrives first.
Record it, with their agreement, and transcribe afterward. A person watching somebody take notes edits themselves. Somebody talking while a recorder runs on the table stops noticing it within ten minutes.
Whoever conducts it should not be their supervisor. The material includes things that went wrong, and a supervisor in the room converts the session into an account of a career.
The eight questions
In this order. The early ones are easy and warm the material up; the productive ones come later, once the person has stopped performing.
1. What would look strange here to somebody arriving fresh? Surfaces the arrangements that exist for forgotten reasons, and it is easy to answer.
2. Why do we do that? Asked of each item from the first question, one at a time, until the reasoning is on the record.
3. Who do you call when something has to move, and what do they actually need from you? The relational layer. Names, roles, and the specific thing that makes each relationship work.
4. What has this organization tried that did not work? Prevents the successor rediscovering dead ends at full cost, and nobody ever writes this down.
5. Tell me about a decision you got wrong. The most valuable question and the one that requires the session to have been set up properly. What you believed, why it was reasonable, and what you had failed to see.
6. Tell me about the hardest decision you made here. Ask for the situation, what was known at the time, what was decided, and what happened. This is the case format, and most people have three or four ready.
7. What tends to go wrong here, and what usually precedes it? Pattern knowledge, which is the closest thing to transferable judgment in the whole session.
8. What are you worried will be lost when you go? Ask it last. People know exactly, have generally never been asked, and the answer is frequently the single most useful thing recorded all afternoon.
Conducting it
Ask for the specific instance whenever a general statement appears. We always check with the county before filing is a rule; the occasion when somebody did not is the material.
Wait after each answer. Three or four seconds, reliably, because the prepared version comes first and the useful part follows the pause.
Do not correct anything, argue with any account, or defend the organization. The session collects what one person believes to be true, and their belief is the thing that has been operating for thirty years.
Ask what year it was. Dates let a successor tell whether a reason still applies, and they are the first thing that vanishes from an undated account.
What to produce
Not a transcript, which nobody reads. Ten to fifteen entries of roughly a page each, in the person’s own words where possible.
Each entry: what the situation was, what was known at the time, what was decided, what happened, and the date. Cases from questions five and six become entries directly. Answers to questions one and two become short notes attached to the practice they explain rather than filed separately.
Send it back to them to check. They will correct two things and add one you did not get, and the review takes them twenty minutes.
Where it lives
A record nobody encounters is not a record. Three placements, and the first is the one that matters.
Attach the causal notes to the thing they explain: in the file for the practice, in the contract folder, next to the procedure. A successor should find the reasoning without knowing to search for it.
Put the cases somewhere a new person is actually given in their first month.
And hold the whole set somewhere the organization controls, not in a departing person’s mailbox or a board member’s home office.
Two cautions
Anything touching personnel matters, litigation, or a specific individual’s conduct does not belong in a document that will circulate. Where a case cannot be told without identifying somebody, either alter it enough that it cannot or leave it out.
For public bodies, remember that a record the organization creates is a record the organization holds, with whatever that implies. Ask counsel before recording anything sensitive rather than afterward.
Neither caution is a reason not to do this. Both are reasons to think for five minutes about what goes in it.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD