For Teams Facing a Retirement or a Key Departure
When your expert leaves, thirty years of judgment leaves with them.
A structured interview engagement that captures what they know (the calls they make, the cues they notice, the exceptions that never made it into a manual) into a record your team and your AI can actually use.
"Write down your processes" has been the advice forever. Almost nobody finds the time.
And when someone does write things down, the document captures the procedure, not the judgment. The steps are there. What's missing is why step three sometimes gets skipped, what a certain sound on the line means, which customer gets the exception, and how the expert knew, two days early, that a batch was going to fail.
That kind of knowledge doesn't come out when you hand someone a blank page. Experts have compressed their judgment into habit; they know more than they can tell. It comes out in a well-run interview, with the right follow-up questions at the right moments.
Asking those questions well is a studied skill. The method I use is grounded in decades of research on knowledge elicitation and the Critical Decision Method, developed for exactly this problem: getting expert judgment out of heads in fields where the stakes made it worth doing right.
How it works
Scope the knowledge at risk
We identify which expert, which decisions and processes matter most, and who needs to use the result (a successor, the whole team, your AI tools, or all three). This sets the interview plan and the fixed fee.
Run the interviews
A short series of focused sessions with your expert, in person or remote. I use Tacit, an interview copilot I built for this work, to track coverage and surface the follow-up questions that pull out the stories and judgment calls a checklist would miss. Tacit’s interview assistance runs on-device. We agree how recordings, transcripts, and any other tools are handled before starting.
Deliver knowledge you can use
You get the transcripts plus the useful forms of them: an executive summary, process documentation, decision guides for the judgment calls, and an organized knowledge base your team can search and your AI tools can read. Yours to keep, in open formats.
Where this fits
Any team where a few people's judgment is the product. The pattern I see most:
A retirement on the calendar
The person who has run the line, the lab, or the book of business for decades has a date. Their successor gets a few months of shadowing if you're lucky. The interviews make that handoff concrete instead of hopeful.
One irreplaceable person
Nobody is leaving yet, but everyone knows the business would be in trouble if they did. Capturing their judgment is insurance you only get to buy while they're still here.
A practice that needs to be transferable
A firm that lives entirely in the owner's head is hard to sell, hard to hand off, and hard to grow. A documented practice is worth more, to a buyer or to the next generation.
The Investment
Fixed fee, scoped on the intro call.
The price depends on how many experts and how much ground we're covering, and it's set before we start. No hourly billing, no open-ended engagement.
The best time to capture what they know is while they're still here.
Book a free 15-minute intro call. We'll talk about whose knowledge is at risk and whether this is the right way to capture it. If it's not a fit, I'll tell you and point you somewhere useful.
Book an intro callKnowledge handoffs are part of a reliable workflow.
Capturing decisions and exceptions can help a successor take over and make the wider process easier to maintain. If the bottleneck extends beyond one expert, we can review the workflow as a whole.
AI Workflow Assessment
Review up to three workflows and get a prioritized plan and first-pilot outline. $499 fixed fee.
AI Operations Partner
Ongoing help building, introducing, and measuring improvements. Starting at $2,000/month, with larger projects scoped separately.