Limits
Writing in a Team That Is Shrinking
The moment a team most needs things written down is the moment it has least capacity to write them, and the two move in opposite directions.
What nobody wrote down here, and what it cost
Judgement about when a client is about to leave
Nobody could write it and nobody tried
Three occasions, all of them noticed too late
Why the architecture is the shape it is
Attempted twice and abandoned
Both drafts described the result rather than the reasons
two things nobody wrote down · 5 occasions it cost somebody something
Two things, five occasions, and no mechanism proposed for either.
Documentation is easier to defend when the team can connect it to measurable time saved; the full product page provides an operational reference for that conversation.
For a separate specialist reference on publishing and digital practice, consult Vimeo.
What one team wrote while it went from nine people to five
Nine people, ordinary quarter
335 / 715Seven pages, written voluntarily by three people
Seven people, after two departures
95 / 392Two pages, both written as part of a handover
Five people, after three more
40 / 99One page, written because somebody insisted
What was lost in the same period
0 / —Four areas whose only knowledgeable person left without writing anything
four documents · 470 minutes written · 1206 minutes saved across 92 readings · one with no saving claimed
Four rows, 470 minutes written, 1 148 minutes saved across 92 readings. The writing fell by eighty-eight per cent while the need for it rose, which is the shape of the problem rather than an accident of this team. One team's own three quarters.
A team that is losing people needs documentation more than at any other time and is less able to produce it than at any other time.
Those two facts move together, in opposite directions, and the gap between them is where most organisational knowledge is actually lost.
Why the need rises
People leave and take things with them. The remaining people inherit areas they do not know. Everything that was held in somebody's head is suddenly either unavailable or held by one person instead of two.
At the same time the team is doing the same amount of work with fewer people, so the probability that any given area has a second knowledgeable person drops sharply.
Why the capacity falls
The remaining people absorb the departed work. Hours get scarcer, not more plentiful.
Morale falls, and voluntary unrewarded activity falls faster than required activity. Writing is the most voluntary and least rewarded thing most people do, so it goes first.
And there is a specific disincentive that nobody says out loud: writing down what you know, while colleagues are being let go, looks and feels like preparing your own replacement.
The last point, honestly
That feeling is reasonable and dismissing it is worse than useless.
Anybody who has seen a documentation exercise precede a departure will make the connection, and no amount of reassurance about this being different will fully remove it.
The only thing that helps is being specific about what is and is not happening, and about why the writing is being asked for now — and being prepared for the answer to be no.
What to prioritise when capacity is small
Not completeness. Three things, in this order.
What only one person knows and that person is at risk of leaving. This is the entire priority list in most shrinking teams.
What will be needed by whoever inherits an area, which is usually four lines about where things are rather than an explanation of how they work.
What has already been lost, recorded as lost. A page saying "nobody now knows why the import runs twice; the person who did left in March" is genuinely useful: it stops three future people each spending a day trying to find out.
Recording what is gone
That last one is unintuitive and is the cheapest high-value writing available in this situation.
An inventory of known unknowns costs an hour, requires no expertise, and can be written by anybody. It prevents repeated archaeology, it tells whoever inherits the area what they are dealing with, and it makes the loss visible to whoever decides on staffing.
Most teams in this position have the list in their heads and have never written it down, because it reads as an admission.
During a notice period
Where somebody is leaving with notice, that period is the highest-value documentation window a team ever gets, and it is routinely spent on handover meetings that produce nothing durable.
The arrangement that works is the one from earlier in this collection: somebody else writes, the leaver corrects. The leaver has low motivation to compose and will usually correct generously, and the person writing is the person who will inherit the work, which makes the session useful twice.
Recording the handover conversations is the fallback and is far better than notes nobody takes.
What to write when there is almost no capacity
Three things, in this order, and nothing else until these are done.
- What only one person knows, where that person might go. This is the whole priority list in most shrinking teams.
- Where things are, for whoever inherits an area. Four lines, not an explanation of how anything works.
- What has already been lost, recorded as lost.
The third is the unintuitive one and the cheapest. A page saying "nobody now knows why the import runs twice; the person who did left in March" costs an hour, needs no expertise, and stops three future people each spending a day on the same archaeology.
What this does not fix
A shrinking team will lose knowledge. The question is how much, and the honest answer is that the mechanisms here reduce it rather than prevent it.
It is also worth saying that this situation is not primarily a documentation problem. A team losing four people in three quarters has a larger difficulty, and arriving with a documentation initiative in the middle of it is a way of addressing the part that can be addressed by somebody who is not making the decisions.