Healthcare Organizations Technology Organizations PE & Portfolio Companies Professional Services Research About Try it for free
73%
of the critical processes we assessed are held by one person with zero documentation.
Findings from 30+ structured voice assessments across field services, healthcare, professional services, and PE-backed portfolio companies.
Average knowledge risk
8.1/10
Above 7 means critical knowledge is concentrated in too few people with too little documentation.
Documented processes (avg per person)
0
Not low. Zero. Across every role we assessed, the average number of formally documented processes was zero.
Time to replace lost knowledge
3-6 mo
When someone leaves, it takes 3-6 months for a replacement to reach equivalent operational knowledge. That is not onboarding time. That is knowledge rebuilding time.

What we keep finding

Four patterns showed up in almost every organization we assessed.

The Dispatcher

One person routes all work, assigns all jobs, manages all escalations. No written criteria exist for how decisions are made. Everyone waits for this person every morning.

In field services companies, we consistently find one person who holds all dispatch logic in their head. When asked how they assign jobs, the answer is always some version of "I just know." That knowledge took years to build and zero minutes to document.

The Relationship Keeper

One person holds all vendor and client relationships personally. Pricing agreements, customer preferences, escalation contacts. None of it is in the CRM.

Customer satisfaction scores are high because one person maintains every relationship. When they leave, the score drops before anyone understands why.

The Duct Tape Manager

Disconnected tools held together by one person's workarounds. QuickBooks plus Google Sheets plus a personal spreadsheet. They have built a system that works, but only they understand it.

Every organization has someone who built the actual operating system. It is not the software they bought. It is the workarounds one person invented to make the software work.

The Undocumented Onboarder

High turnover means constant retraining, but the person doing the training has never documented what they teach. Onboarding lives in their head. Every new hire gets a slightly different version.

Onboarding takes 3x longer than it should because the person training has no documentation to work from. They are rebuilding from memory every time.

Most organizations do not know they have this problem. The people who hold tribal knowledge are usually the highest performers. They are reliable, they are trusted, and they have been there long enough that everyone assumes they will always be there. Nobody thinks about what happens when they take a new job, retire, or get sick. The risk is invisible until the day it is not.

Find out where the knowledge lives in your organization.

The assessment takes 5 minutes per person. The report shows you what you did not know you were about to lose.