The thing that only lives in one head

There's a process inside every small business that nobody ever wrote down.

Not because the founder is disorganised, and not because it isn't important. Usually because when it was built, she was the only one who needed to know it. She was the process. And when things are working, nobody thinks to extract them from the person doing them.

Then the business grows. The process doesn't move. It just stays where it always was: in the one head that holds everything.

I come across this constantly. Not as a crisis. That's the thing that surprises people. It's just a feature of successful small businesses. You build something, it works, it becomes normal, and the normalness of it means nobody ever stops to ask where it actually lives.

I was working through a client's business with her recently, going through how things move from first enquiry to final invoice. At a certain point I asked about a particular recurring piece of work. How does this get done?

The honest answer was: she does it. From memory. From a combination of knowing how it went last time and adjusting for this time. Every time.

It had never occurred to her to question this, because it had never caused a problem. The job got done and it got done well. But the method lived only in her head, and nowhere else.

When we tried to put it on paper, it was more complex than either of us expected. There were decisions inside it that had never been named as decisions. Steps that assumed knowledge she had accumulated over years and had long since stopped consciously noticing. Judgement calls made correctly the same way, again and again, until they stopped feeling like choices at all.

Writing it down didn't just document a process. It revealed one.

What I want to say isn't that you should go and document everything immediately. It's more specific than that.

It's that you can't see the thing you're in clearly. Not fully. Not when you're standing inside it.

It's just that you're too close to it. Too practised at it. You've made peace with the way things work. The gaps in what's written down are invisible to you because you've been filling them in automatically for so long that you've stopped knowing you're doing it.

Someone standing outside the business sees it differently. They come in not knowing the shortcut, not knowing the unwritten rule, not knowing the step you take at this point to catch the thing that would otherwise slip. So they can see where the process relies on you being present. They can see what would happen if it had to exist without you.

Sometimes what they find is reassuring. The risk is smaller than it felt. The process is simpler than the anxiety around it. Sometimes what they find is the thing that would have been expensive to discover later, under worse conditions.

Either way, it's better to know.

August tends to be the time people start thinking about this. The quieter pace creates space to look at the whole picture in a way the rest of the year doesn't allow. If that's where you are, noticing what only lives in your head and wondering what it would take to change that, it's worth paying attention to that thought.

The relief when something moves from your memory to a page is real and immediate. It's lighter than you expected, because you'd stopped noticing the weight.