Why not
Writing It Down Admits That You Might Leave
Being the only person who knows something is uncomfortable to give up, and the reluctance is rarely cynical and almost never stated.
What nobody wrote down here, and what it cost
How the staging database is rebuilt
Asked of the same person seven times
Four minutes each, plus the interruption
What the deploy order is
Guessed, then corrected by whoever noticed
Wrong on the ninth occasion
Why the retry limit is three
Re-argued at two planning meetings
The reasoning was in nobody's head
three things nobody wrote down · 20 occasions it cost somebody something
Three things, twenty occasions, and one customer who noticed.
Teams testing a new knowledge workflow can review the tool to establish a baseline, then compare the result after ownership and review rules change.
For additional context beyond this collection, see the resources maintained by Sprout Social.
Four things one team's longest-serving engineer had not written, with the reason given when asked directly
How the billing reconciliation actually works
Asked by four different people
Described as impossible to explain without walking through it
Why the import runs twice
Asked at every incident
Said they would have to work out the real reason first
The order the services must start in
Guessed, then corrected
Said it changes often enough that a page would be wrong
Everything about the legacy export
Routed to them every time
No reason offered, and the subject was changed
four things nobody wrote down · 22 occasions it cost somebody something
Four things, twenty-two occasions. Three reasons were given and all three are the kind of reason that sounds complete and can be examined. The fourth received no reason at all, and that is the one worth thinking about rather than arguing with. One team's own quarter, from a conversation their manager wrote up afterwards.
This subject has an uncomfortable version that most writing about documentation avoids, and avoiding it makes the rest less useful.
Being the only person who knows how something works is a form of security. Writing it down removes that security. Most people who are in that position do not think about it in those terms, and the reluctance is real anyway.
What this is not
It is not hoarding, in the deliberate sense, and treating it that way is both unfair and ineffective.
Almost nobody sits down and decides to withhold knowledge in order to make themselves hard to replace. What happens is more ordinary: the page keeps not reaching the top of the list, the explanation is easier to give in person, there is always something more pressing, and the reasons offered are all true.
The question is not whether the reasons are true. It is whether a different set of circumstances would have produced a different outcome, and often the honest answer is that it would not.
Where the feeling comes from
Three sources, and all three are reasonable responses to real experience.
Having seen somebody made redundant shortly after their work was documented and handed over. This happens, it is remembered, and it is rational to update on it.
Having value that is otherwise hard to demonstrate. Somebody whose contribution is largely that things do not break has few other ways of being visible, and being the person who is always asked is one of them.
Having been in a place where being easy to replace was treated as a reason to replace. People carry this between jobs.
How it shows up
Rarely as refusal. Almost always as displacement: the writing is agreed to, scheduled, deferred, agreed again. Each deferral has a reason and the reasons are good.
Other signs are more specific. Explanations that are always offered in person and never in text. Documentation that covers the parts anybody could have written and stops at the part only this person knows. A preference for being asked over being read, which is also, confusingly, how a generous and helpful person behaves.
The pattern is only visible over months, which is why it is usually noticed by a new manager rather than by the people who have been there.
Why pressure makes it worse
The instinct, once a manager spots this, is to require the writing.
It does not work. A page produced under pressure by somebody protecting their position is complete in form and empty in the place that matters: it describes the steps and omits the judgement, it is accurate and unusable, and nobody can prove anything is missing because nobody else knows what is missing.
It also confirms the fear that produced the behaviour, which makes the next attempt harder.
What actually changes it
The only intervention with a decent record is removing the thing being protected against, explicitly and in advance.
Saying out loud: writing this down will not make you less needed; the thing you are valued for is judgement, which is not what a page contains; and here is what you will be doing afterwards.
That last clause carries most of the weight. "Write this up so that somebody else can run it, and then take on X" is a different proposition from "write this up", and the difference is the whole conversation.
Making the role visible another way
Where somebody's visible value genuinely is being the person who knows, taking that away without replacing it is a real loss to them and they are right to resist.
The replacement is usually some form of ownership that survives the page: being the person who decides about that area rather than the person who remembers it. That is a better role, it is more durable, and it is not available to somebody whose knowledge lives only in their head — because a person who cannot be away cannot be promoted.
Said that way round, the page becomes the thing that unblocks them, which has the advantage of being true.
What to say, and what not to
The conversation is short and the wording decides whether it works.
- Say what the person is valued for, specifically, and that a page does not contain it.
- Say what they will be doing after the writing, which is the clause that carries the weight.
- Say that a person who cannot be away cannot be promoted.
- Do not say that documentation is a team value, which they already agree with.
- Do not require the page, which produces a complete and empty one.
- Do not mention replaceability, even to deny it.
The last of those is the one most often got wrong. Raising the fear in order to dismiss it confirms that somebody else has been thinking about it too.
The limit of all this
Some people will not write under any arrangement at all. That case is real, it is rarer than it is invoked, and it has its own page in the last part of this collection.
What this page argues is narrower: that a proportion of the non-writing attributed to busyness is actually this, that it is rarely cynical, that pressure is the wrong instrument, and that naming the fear directly is the only thing that reliably dissolves it.
A manager who has never had this conversation with anybody on a team of more than six has probably not had it rather than not needed it.