I asked a client how the process manual was going. He's been running the place for over 10 years. Good operator. Knows his numbers, knows his people, and knows within about four seconds whether a job is going to turn into a problem.
He looked at the wall for a while. "Yeah," he said. "Haven't started."
Six months. Not stalled halfway. Not sitting in a folder going stale. Never started.
And here's the bit that stuck with me. He wasn't making excuses — he was embarrassed. He'd been carrying it round for six months as a personal failing. Like it was a discipline problem. Like if he'd just been a bit more organised, a bit less flat out, a bit more the sort of person who finishes things, the manual would exist by now.
He has ADHD (like many business owners). Might be part of it. Might have nothing to do with it at all — I've watched people who read and write beautifully do exactly the same thing, and I've watched them be just as embarrassed about it.
Why he wanted the manual in the first place
Same reason everyone does.
The business lives in his head. He can't sell it — or he can, but not for what it's actually worth, because a buyer looks at a business that depends on one person and prices in the risk of that person leaving. He can't take a month off. Not properly. He can go away, but the phone comes with him and there's always a Tuesday where something needs him.
And he can't hand a real piece of it to anyone. He's tried. He's got good people. But the part that matters — the four seconds where he knows a job's going to go bad — isn't written anywhere, and he can't hand over something that doesn't exist outside his own head.
That is what happens when you decide to do something about it.
So he got the advice everybody gets. Write it down.
We already ran this experiment.
Some of you old buggers will remember the early 2000s. Knowledge management. Every firm of any size built a repository — an intranet, a shared drive with a folder structure somebody had clearly enjoyed designing, a system where everyone was supposed to deposit what they knew so the organisation could use it after they'd gone home or gone elsewhere.
Consultants got very rich explaining this. I know, because I've written some of those documents myself. And embarrassingly, charged for them, too.
It failed. Not partially — comprehensively, across basically every industry that tried it, and it failed the same way in all of them. The repositories filled up with the easy stuff: templates, org charts, the policy on expense claims. The hard stuff never went in. And within about eighteen months everything in there was out of date, so nobody trusted it, so nobody opened it, so nobody bothered updating it. Wheels spinning in the mud.
The researchers at the time reckoned the stuff that actually mattered — the judgement, the pattern recognition, the four seconds — was something like eighty or ninety percent of what made an experienced person valuable. And that was precisely the portion that never made it into the system.
Twenty-five years later we're telling business owners to do the same thing, on their own, at night, after the kids are in bed.
Here's the part nobody says out loud
It isn't that owners won't write it down. It's that they can't.
Ask an experienced operator why they made a call and watch what happens. You get an answer — a good one, tidy, logical, and largely invented on the spot. Not dishonestly. That's just what a brain does when you ask it to explain something it did on instinct. It reverse-engineers a sensible-sounding path to a conclusion it had already reached by another route entirely.
Now do the opposite. Put a wrong answer in front of the same person. Tell them you'd price that job at forty grand and take it on next month.
You'll have the real reasoning in about four seconds. Unprompted. Usually with some feeling behind it. "No — you can't, because that client always changes the brief in week three and if you've quoted forty you'll wear it."
That's it. That's the thing you were trying to get onto the page. It doesn't come out when you ask for it politely. It comes out the second something's wrong in front of it.
So the blank page isn't a character flaw. The blank page is what it looks like when you've asked a person to do something the human brain isn't built to do. My client hadn't failed for six months. He'd been given the wrong instruction and then blamed himself for not following it.
And now the thing that's actually changed!
This is where it gets interesting, and it's got nothing to do with the manual.
Everything above has been true for twenty-five years. What's different now is that the cost of getting this stuff out of someone's head has fallen off a cliff — not because owners have suddenly become writers, but because you no longer have to start from a blank page at all.
Something can now put a first attempt in front of you. Wrong, usually. Confidently wrong, sometimes. And you already know what you do with something wrong.
You correct it. In four seconds. With feeling.
Correcting is a completely different act from authoring. Authoring is a job you'll put off for six months. Correcting isn't even work — it's the thing you can't stop yourself doing.
I'm not going to pretend that's the whole answer, because it isn't, and there's a lot in it I'm still working out. But the shape of it matters more than the detail: documentation was always the wrong shape for this problem. Correction is the right shape. Everything else is a question of how.
So
If you've got a manual you've been meaning to write, or a handover document, or a folder somebody set up with good intentions — you haven't failed at it. The instruction was wrong. Twenty-five years of very expensive evidence says so.
I'm working on this properly with a handful of owners at the moment — sitting in the room with them, going at it from the other end. Not one of them has been asked to write anything down. There's no name for it yet and I'm not selling anything here, but it's the most interesting thing on my desk and if it sounds like your business, come and have the conversation now rather than in two years when something forces it. Send me a message and I'll set up a call.
Good luck out there. And don't forget to have fun!
