The Standard pack.

You got here one of two ways. Either nothing goes out without you reading it first, or you taught people well enough that they do it without you, and the whole thing now rests on them staying. Both are the same problem. Good is defined by a person, and nobody wrote it down.

You have tried. There is a folder somewhere. A handbook from when you hired the third person, a shared page, an onboarding document. It died. And you decided that writing a business down does not really work.

It does work. Yours died for three reasons, and the first two are not your fault.

One. You wrote the steps, not the decisions.

They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on.

Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (2009), on what Daniel Boorman of Boeing taught him about bad checklists.

Steps are the easy half. Anybody can follow “attach the file, copy the address, press send”. What nobody can follow is the reason you would not send it at all.

Two. The part that mattered, you could not say.

We can know more than we can tell.

Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (1966).

You did not leave the important bit out because you were rushing. You left it out because it is hard to find words for something while you are busy doing it. That happens to everybody who is good at something.

Three. A document just sits there.

Say you fix both. You write the decisions and you find the words. The document is right, and it still will not work, because somebody has to remember it exists and read the right part at the moment they are busiest. So they ask you instead, and you are back where you started.

The first two are writing problems, and these worksheets fix them. Hold the third one until the end.

You are the last read on the work. Not because you are controlling, but because “good” has never existed anywhere except in your head. So the only way to apply it is to look at everything.

This fixes that. Not by describing your standards, but by writing down what makes you send something back, which is a much smaller and much more useful thing.

Think about the last ten things you handed back. Write the reason, in the words you would say out loud. If you get past seven lines, you are writing a rewrite, not a test. Cut it.

Then do exactly this

1. Hand the list over and say it is the whole test. Not guidance. The test.
2. Check the list, not the work. This is the hard part, and it is the only part that matters.
3. When it passes and you still dislike it, the list is missing a rule. Add it, say what you added and why, and let them go again.
4. Never take the decision back. One overturned decision teaches everybody that asking you is still the safest route.

You have finished this worksheet when work goes out that you did not read, and when you see it afterwards, you agree with it.

The other half of the same problem. They ask you before they act, because there is nowhere else to look. They are not avoiding responsibility. They are doing the sensible thing.

Do not try to guess your top five questions. Everybody guesses wrong. Log them for a week instead, change nothing, and let the repeats sort themselves. One line each, written down before you answer.

Friday: the five that repeat

The ones you wrote more than once are not questions. They are rules. Write the answer to each, in the words you actually use. Then put them where the work happens, next to the job, not in a document.

One whole job, off your desk for good. Paste this into any AI and answer out loud. It interviews you and writes the note. Talking is the thing you are already good at.

You are helping me write a handover note. I have just finished a job in my business and I want somebody else to do it next time without asking me anything.  Interview me ONE question at a time. Wait for my answer. Do not write the note until you have asked all seven and I say I am done. 
1. What is the job, in one sentence, and what makes it start?
2. Walk me through what you actually did, in order. Do not tidy it up.
3. Which of those steps were a CHOICE rather than a rule?
4. For each choice: what were the options, which did you pick, and
why? The reason matters more than the choice.
5. How would somebody know they had finished it properly, without
asking me?
6. What must never be decided without me?
7. What would annoy me if they got it wrong, but I would never think
to mention?  Then write it as: THE JOB / IT STARTS WHEN / YOU WILL NEED / DO THIS / DECIDE LIKE THIS (every choice as "if X, do Y, because Z") / DONE MEANS / WHEN IT GOES WRONG / ASK ME FIRST ABOUT / USE THESE WORDS.  Rules: write what I said, not best practice. Keep the unusual parts, they are usually the valuable ones. Every choice carries its reason. If an answer is vague, ask again. Plain English, no preamble.

Read it once, change anything that is not how you would say it, then hand it over without explaining it. If they can do the job from the note alone, it is finished. If they cannot, the note is what you fix. Not the job, and not the person.

Needs-doing work is the job in front of you, the client on the phone, the thing that broke. Could-be-done work is the other kind: the thing nobody asked for that makes next quarter easier. It needs spare time and permission to act without checking. At this stage nobody has either.

In a small team you can hold all of it in your head. As the team grows, you cannot, and the failure is never dramatic. Everything slows down a little, and nobody can point at why.

And if you are thinking “it does not all run through me, I have an operations manager”: you did not remove the hub. You moved it. That is fine until they are off for a fortnight, or you open a second site.

These worksheets fix reasons one and two. They are yours now. Do them and your business is better whether or not you ever speak to us.

They do not fix reason three. A written standard still sits there, and the person who needs it is still busy at the moment they need it. That is the part we fix.

We start with your Roadmap: we read what your business runs on, write down what is in the way, and recommend one build with its price. The build puts your rules where the work happens. Then, on the monthly, we run Pulse for you. It notices what needs attention and does the work in your words. You choose what it may send on its own, and what waits for a person.

We will not quote you a saving. We have not measured a year of before and after, so any figure would be a guess with a decimal point. On a first call we talk about what it costs you to leave it, and if the answer is that you should do it yourself, we will say so.

When you have finished the three worksheets, take the diagnostic again. Most people find they have moved, and the next pack is different. Six questions, about 90 seconds, no email needed to see your result.

Take the diagnostic again