The symptom
Consider an organisation where a long-serving employee retires after many years in a role nobody thought to interrogate too closely, because it had simply always worked. Within four months of her departure, three separate problems arise in her former area — none of which anyone had anticipated, and none of which appear to trace to any single documented responsibility she held.
The handover, by the organisation’s own standards, was thorough: six weeks, covering every responsibility listed in her job description. And yet something that kept the area functioning is now visibly missing.
What leaders usually conclude
The natural conclusion is that the handover period was too short, or too narrowly scoped, and that a longer or more structured transition would have caught what was missed. This is a comfortable explanation because it implies a fixable process problem — more time, a better checklist, a formal transition template — rather than anything harder to address.
What the evidence suggests
In the scenario above, the problems that surfaced after her departure were not in any documented responsibility. They were in things she noticed, chased, and corrected without anyone recording that she was doing so — decisions she made routinely that were never written down as decisions belonging to her role, because they had never been formally assigned to anyone. The organisation had documented her job description. It had not documented her practice, and the gap between the two had been invisible for as long as she was the one closing it.
This is a recognisable variant of a broader pattern in how decision ownership erodes during growth. Bain & Company’s research into decision rights, led by Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko, found that unclear ownership is one of the most common blockages to organisational performance — and, notably, that the ambiguity is frequently invisible until a decision needs to be made and nobody is confident whose call it is. An undocumented practice sustained by one person’s initiative is an extreme version of unclear ownership: the ownership was never ambiguous in daily operation, because one person quietly held it, but it was never formally assigned either, which means it disappears completely the moment that person does.
Competing explanations
A handover failure of this kind admits more than one reading. It could indicate, as the initial conclusion suggests, a process gap — the handover should have captured informal practice, not only formal duties, and a different transition method would have surfaced it. It could also indicate something less comfortable: that the organisation has an unknown number of similar gaps, currently invisible because the people quietly closing them have not yet left, and that this retirement is simply the first one to become visible rather than an isolated case.
A third possibility is worth naming precisely because it complicates the tidy narrative: some of what a capable, long-serving employee does cannot be fully captured in any handover, however thorough, because it consists of judgement calls accumulated through years of exposure to edge cases that a shorter tenure would never have encountered. In this reading, the problem is not a fixable documentation gap at all, but an inherent limit on how much of organisational memory can be transferred through any formal process.
The consequences of this kind of gap rarely appear immediately. The three problems that surfaced within four months of the departure in the scenario above are typical of the pattern — issues do not arise on day one, because whatever residual momentum, documentation, or institutional habit existed continues to carry the area for a period. The gap becomes visible only once something occurs that specifically required the undocumented judgement the departed employee was quietly supplying, and there is no reliable way to predict how long that period of apparent normality will last before the first such occurrence.
A related misconception is that this risk is proportional to how senior or visible a role is. In practice, some of the most consequential undocumented practice sits with people whose roles are not considered senior at all — someone who has simply been in a position long enough to have accumulated judgement nobody thought to formalise, because the role’s formal description never appeared to warrant that level of attention. Organisations auditing for this kind of exposure by seniority alone are likely to miss where it is actually concentrated.
It is also worth distinguishing this pattern from simple understaffing. The area in the scenario above was not short of people after the departure — the three problems that emerged were not caused by a gap in headcount, since a replacement had been hired and given a thorough handover by the organisation’s own standard. The gap was specifically in a category of ownership that had never been named as a responsibility at all, which is a different problem than losing capacity, and one that adding headcount alone does not solve.
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Questions worth considering
- How much of what currently keeps other parts of the organisation working is similarly undocumented — held by people whose departure has not yet tested it?
- Have a role’s written description and its actual practice ever been formally compared, rather than assumed to match?
More on this topic: Governance.
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