Getting it out of one person's head

Every organization has at least one person who is good at something nobody can explain.

The best closer. The tech everybody asks for by name. A swim teacher who can get a frightened nine year old to put his face in the water. Ask them how they do it and the answer is not useful. I just read people. You have to actually care about them. That is not modesty. The knowledge is real, but they have never had to say it out loud, so it does not have words yet.

The instinct is to promote that person and hope it spreads. It does not spread. What spreads is their confidence, which is a different thing and worth much less.

What works is slower and it is mostly interviewing.

You sit with them and walk the thing in order. Not what do you do, which gets you a philosophy. What happens next. Then what. Over and over until there are no gaps. Then you watch them work and write down the parts they left out, because they will leave out the parts they are best at. Those are invisible from the inside. The valuable material is usually in what they do when something goes wrong, not in the clean version they described to you.

Then you hand the document to somebody with no particular talent for the job and see whether they can run it. That is the only test that counts. Not whether the expert approves of the document. Whether a stranger can produce a decent version of the result from it.

The first draft always fails that test, and the failure is the useful part. It tells you exactly which step is still living in their head.

Two things make this worth the trouble.

The obvious one is that the person eventually leaves. The one that matters more is that until it is written down you cannot tell a process problem from a people problem. With no standard, every bad result looks like somebody's fault and every good one looks like talent. Write it down and you can finally see which is which.

I have done this twice, fifteen years apart, in two industries with nothing in common. Both times the hardest part was identical. The expert does not believe it can be written down. They are not being difficult. It genuinely feels like judgment to them, because that is how expertise feels from the inside.