Going AI-native

Capturing your team's know-how before it walks out the door

In most trade businesses the real procedures live in a few people's heads: which landlord wants to be asked before any spend, which contractor answers on a Saturday, what to say when a job slips. That know-how is the business. When the person who holds it is off sick or hands in their notice, the gaps show up fast.

Some people name this "tribal knowledge". We say know-how. Here's how to get it written down without a six-month documentation project.

Why documentation projects stall

Owners who have tried wikis, screen recordings and SOP drives tend to report the same thing: writing it all down is a separate task from the actual work, so it slides down the list until there's a crisis. The answer isn't a better tool. It's capturing know-how in short sessions, as close to the real work as possible, starting with what would hurt most to lose.

What to capture first

Rank tasks by what would happen if nobody knew how to do them, not by how important they look:

1. Anything with an external deadline. Renewals, inspections, statutory checks, client reporting dates.
2. Anything only one person can log into or approve. Supplier portals, approval steps, accounts nobody else knows exist.
3. Rare recovery steps. What to do when something that seldom breaks does break.
4. Routine judgement. When to escalate, which costs are fine without approval, when a debt is worth chasing.
5. Everyday tasks. These come last, because colleagues have usually watched them done.

How to capture it

• Do and narrate. Ask the person to do the task while talking it through, rather than describing it from memory. Doing it brings out the details: the step that has to come first, the client who always needs something extra.
• Ask the uncomfortable questions. "What goes wrong with this most often?" "How do you decide?" "What did you do the last time it failed?" The exceptions are where the value is.
• Write a short checklist, not an essay. Number the steps, mark the decision points, and note the exceptions.
• Do it together. Short sessions with someone asking questions and writing things down get further than asking people to "update the wiki".

Know-how interview questions (print and use)

• What starts this task, and how do you notice it?
• What do you check first?
• Where do you decide one way or the other, and what decides it?
• Who do you tell, and what do you tell them?
• What goes wrong most often? What has gone badly wrong before?
• What can only you do, or log into?
• What does "done" look like?

Test it

Hand the checklist to a colleague who has never done the task, and have them follow it while the expert watches without helping. Every place they get stuck is a gap. Fill it while the expert is still in the room.

Keep it alive

Give each written procedure an owner and a review date, and update it on the day something goes wrong or someone asks a question it should have answered. For a template, see Writing SOPs with AI.

Where Lorework comes in

Captured know-how is what lets the routine work be handed over. Lorework learns your procedures and templates and follows them on routine work, showing the sources behind what it does. It keeps a record of what was done, which also shows where a procedure is missing or unclear.

In letting, for example, the first trade Lorework is built for, that means repair reports handled following the agency's own repair procedure, in the agency's tone, with anything that needs a person coming back to the team. For the rules Scottish agencies work to, see the Code of Practice on repairs. General information, not legal or qualified advice.

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