Learn and improve
The prompt book
One written source anyone could run from
One living document capturing how a critical process runs, detailed enough that a replacement could run it cold.
Borrowed from stage management in theater, where the prompt book holds everything needed to run the show. Read the original source.
Changes a rule or role · Days or ongoing effort · Anyone on the team can start it
Try this first
Pick the process that would break if one person vanished, and write it down well enough for someone else to run.
Use it when
There's key-person risk and the process lives in one head.
Skip it when
Documenting everything to this standard costs more than it returns. Spend it on the critical, key-person processes, and only where someone will maintain it.
How to introduce it
Keep a single living document for how a critical piece of work runs. Every step, decision, and quirk, detailed enough that someone else could pick it up cold. Theater keeps a prompt book so another person can run the show. It protects you against a critical process, often an AI-assisted one, living entirely in one person's head.
How to show up
Find where the key-person risk sits and build the document there. Then keep it current, because the value is in it being live. A document written once and abandoned is worse than none.
How long it takes
Real effort to build for a critical process. Ongoing effort to keep it current.
What makes it hard
Capturing a process fully, including the tacit knowledge the expert cannot easily articulate, is slow and tedious, and it gets postponed because nothing is wrong yet. Keeping it current is the real challenge, since a stale document gives false confidence.
What it looks like when it's working
Critical processes are documented well enough for someone else to run them, and the team is not hostage to one person. A key person's absence still breaking things means the document is incomplete or stale.
How long until it sticks
It proves itself the first time someone runs the process from the document alone.
How you know it stuck
The team keeps living documents for its critical processes and no essential operation lives in one head.
The idea behind it
A critical process that only one person understands is a predictable continuity risk. One source of truth keeps the work alive when that person is out, and forces the tacit knowledge into the open.
Where it comes from
Stage management. One living document that lets someone else run the operation cold, resilience against key-person risk. A single meticulous source of truth for the whole show, so a replacement could run it if needed.