Write down the decisions, not the steps

The renewal procedure is two pages long and every line of it is correct. Pull the policy ahead of the renewal date, review the coverage, check the carrier's offer, send the client a renewal letter. A new account manager followed it to the letter in her first month and still walked to the same desk eleven times, because none of her questions were about steps. They were about decisions.

The steps were never the hard part

Most firms that have tried documentation have a procedure like this one. Someone sat down, listed what they do in order, and saved it to the shared drive. It reads well. It is also the part of the job a capable new hire could have worked out alone.

The expensive knowledge sits between the lines. Does an increase this size go back to market, or get explained to the client? Which carrier takes a restaurant with a deep fryer? When does a coverage change need the producer to see it first? The person who has done the work for years answers each one in a second, without noticing she decided anything. That is why it never made it onto the page.

Panopto's survey of 1,001 employees put a number on what that costs the people around her: an average of five hours a week waiting to reach the one colleague who holds the answer, and eight more working by trial and error when that colleague is not available (Panopto, 2019). It is a United States sample and it is not new, but the pattern will be familiar from your own office. A procedure that holds only the steps leaves every one of those hours in place.

Ask what rule she just used

Getting the decisions out takes a different method than getting the steps out. Asking someone to describe their job produces the steps, because that is what people remember doing. The decisions only show up while the work is happening.

So sit with her on a real renewal, start to finish, and have her think out loud. Record it if she is comfortable, so nobody is scribbling. Every time she says "this one needs" or "that one's fine", stop and ask what rule she just used.

Then pin the rule to something a newcomer can check. Not "big increases go back to market", but an increase over a set percentage goes back to market. Not "the producer should see it", but any change to liability limits goes to the producer before the client sees it. A rule with a threshold can be followed by someone who has never met the client.

Test the page on someone who has never done the job

The person who wrote the procedure cannot test it. She reads her own page and fills every gap from memory without seeing the gap. The only real test is to hand it to someone who has never done the work and watch.

Give the page to your newest hire along with a live file. Ask them to complete it from the page alone and to write down every question instead of asking it. Each question is a hole in the page, and each one is good news, because you found it in a test and not in front of a client. Fix the page, not the person. Then run it again with the next file. When a round produces no questions, the page is done.

The page belongs to the firm once it has an owner

A page that passed its test is out of date within a year. A carrier changes its appetite, a new form appears, a kind of client shows up that nobody planned for. If nobody is named to keep the page current, the new exceptions go back to living in one head and the old dependency returns quietly.

So the page gets an owner, and the rule is that every new decision gets added the week it first comes up. That is the difference between documentation as a project and documentation as how the firm works. The first decays. The second means that when the person who knew everything takes two weeks off, or leaves, the work keeps moving, because the knowledge stopped being hers some time ago.

Start with one decision from this week

Pick the person on your team who fields the most questions. Ask them to name one decision they made this week that a new hire would get wrong. Write the rule down with a number or a named condition attached, put it in the procedure at the step where the decision happens, and put a name next to it as owner.

Then give that one step to someone who has never done it and count the questions. One decision, one test, one owner. That is enough to show you how much of your operation lives between the lines.