We speak to brands every single day where a single person has built, and is still the only one who fully understands, the system that runs purchase orders, or the bill of materials, or most of the operational reporting the business relies on day to day. That person is good at it. That’s never in question. The question nobody’s asked is what happens the week they’re not available.
This is one of the most common patterns we see in brands scaling past the point where informal systems should still be working. It’s rarely framed as a risk internally, because the person carrying it is usually excellent, well-liked, and at the same time entirely too busy to document how any of it actually works. It’s come up in conversation after conversation recently, with different brands, in almost identical terms.
Efficient, right up until it isn’t
A system built and maintained by one person is, for a while, the fastest possible way to get things done. No committee, no sign-off, no waiting for a change request to clear a queue. That speed is real, and it’s exactly why nobody wants to slow it down by asking someone to document it properly.
The cost of that speed shows up later, and it shows up all at once. A holiday, a resignation, an unexpected absence, and the business discovers that an entire operational process lived in one person’s head, with the system itself as a set of clues rather than a set of instructions. The automation everyone assumes is running quietly in the background, except it doesn’t run when the one person who checks it isn’t there to check it. The workflow that grinds to a halt because it only ever ran from one laptop, and that laptop is currently at the airport.
Ownership isn’t the same as control
The brands who get this right aren’t the ones who take the system away from the person who built it. They’re the ones who separate “this person built it and understands it best” from “this person is the only route through it.” Plenty of brands are explicit about wanting exactly this: they don’t want to depend on an external partner, or a single internal specialist, for every change. They want the tools they use to actually belong to the team running the business day to day.
That’s a different ask to “hire more people.” It’s an ask about whether the knowledge is written down, whether more than one person could make a routine change without asking permission, and whether the system would survive its architect leaving on good terms tomorrow.
The audit that actually matters
A useful exercise, and an uncomfortable one: pick the three systems your operation would struggle most without, and ask how many people could rebuild each one from documentation alone if the original builder vanished tomorrow. If the honest answer is one, or none, you’ve found where the real risk sits - not in the system itself, but in the fact that it only exists properly in someone’s head.
This isn’t a case for slowing everyone down with process for its own sake. It’s a case for writing down the two or three things that would actually hurt if they disappeared with a person, rather than everything, because trying to document everything is how documentation projects die. Do the exercise this week. Pick the three systems. Ask the question. Whatever the answer is, it’s more useful than not knowing.
The system usually isn’t the fragile part. The single point of failure almost always has a holiday calendar, and no idea they’ve become one.
This is something we spoke about in detail at OX2 London this July. We’ll no doubt talk about it again at OX3 Stockholm on 22nd October. If you want to be involved in those conversations, apply for a spot below.