The Go-To Person Problem
The short answer: nearly every company runs on knowledge concentrated in one or two people's heads. That person — the one everybody goes to — becomes a bottleneck while they're present, a crisis while they're away, and a permanent loss if they leave. The fix isn't a wiki. It's capturing what they know, with their voice, before you need it.
You know exactly who yours is
She's the one who knows the real prices — not the list prices, the real ones. She knows which customers need a call before the invoice, which supplier's “in stock” means Thursday, and how that one recurring problem actually gets fixed. New hires learn the job by orbiting her. The owner makes decisions by consulting her. Her phone is the company's unofficial help desk, and it rings all day.
Every company we talk to can name this person in under three seconds. Most have never thought of her as infrastructure. She is. She's the operating system the business actually runs on — undocumented, unbacked-up, and walking around on two legs.
The costs are not soft
It would be easy to file this under “culture” and move on, except the numbers are blunt:
- 5.3 hours per week, per worker are wasted waiting for vital information from colleagues or recreating knowledge that already exists somewhere in the company.
- 42% of institutional knowledge is unique to one individual — acquired for their role, shared with no one. When that person is unavailable, coworkers literally cannot do that share of the job.
- 60% of employees say getting vital job information from colleagues ranges from difficult to nearly impossible — and 81% report frustration when they can't get what they need.
- Step back further, and knowledge workers spend 19% of the entire workweek just searching and gathering information.
Now aim those numbers at your go-to person. Every one of those waiting hours, somebody was probably waiting on her. Every search that failed ended in a walk to her desk. She is where the company's information friction collects — which means she is also where it can be fixed.
Why the usual fixes die
The standard answer is a wiki, a shared drive, a procedures binder. They all fail the same way: they ask the busiest person in the company to also become its technical writer. She won't — not from stubbornness, but from arithmetic. Documenting competes with doing, and doing always wins, so the wiki launches thin, ages fast, and within a year nobody trusts it enough to check it. People go back to asking Bertha. They were always going to.
The insight behind Odell is that capture has to be a conversation, not a writing assignment. People who would never produce a procedures manual will happily explain, out loud, how the warranty callback works while someone smart listens and asks the right follow-ups. So Odell interviews: the owner first — who knows what, who does everybody go to — then each knowledge-holder, in role-shaped conversations. Odell does the writing. Humans do the approving.
What changes when her brain is on tap
Her knowledge goes into a cabinet — hers, named for her, sourced to her interviews and her documents. Everyone she's been answering for can now ask the cabinet instead: at 2 a.m., from the field, on a new hire's first day. Answers cite her, which keeps her authority intact. When a question isn't covered, it routes back to her as a gap ticket — so her interruptions shrink to only the genuinely new questions, and every answer she gives makes the cabinet smarter.
Two things owners don't expect: first, the go-to person is usually relieved. Being irreplaceable sounds like job security and feels like a trap. Second, the company gets honest about permissions — her pricing knowledge and her procedures knowledge are different drawers, and Odell keeps them that way.
The go-to person problem isn't that you have a Bertha. Every good company does. The problem is that Bertha's knowledge retires when she does. Interview her now, while it's a compliment — not later, when it's an emergency.
Statistics: Panopto, Workplace Knowledge and Productivity Report (2018), survey of 1,000+ U.S. workers; McKinsey Global Institute, The Social Economy (2012).