The moment documentation comes up, the mind goes to fat binders of procedures and forms and ISO manuals, the sort of thing you assume belongs to large companies and factories. Then you look at your team of a few people and say we do not need all that bureaucracy, our work runs on talking to each other.
But every time someone takes leave or resigns, part of the work locks up. Because the knowledge of that job was never written down anywhere and lives in that one person’s head.
What documentation is, and why it gets mistaken for paperwork
In its simplest definition, documentation means writing down exactly how a job gets done, in what order, and by what rule the decisions along the way are made, so that someone else can do that job correctly without asking you. That is precisely where it differs from the paperwork most people picture, because bureaucracy is written for control and signatures and filing, while good documentation is written for transfer, so the knowledge in one person’s head reaches the next person.
If you look at a business the way you look at a body, documentation is the work of the nervous system, the network that carries an instruction from the brain to the hands without the brain having to stand over every movement and direct each one. In a business with no documentation, the brain is the owner and there is no network at all, so every instruction has to come live out of their mouth, and that means nothing moves unless they are personally there to explain it.
In a small business everything sits in people’s heads, not on paper
This problem is far more widespread in Iran than it looks, because the fabric of the economy is small. According to reports published on the country’s industry, somewhere around 90 to 94 percent of Iranian industry falls into the small and medium category, and official figures put roughly 44 percent of all national employment inside those small industrial units. So a large share of working people in Iran are employed by small businesses, and a small business almost always shares one trait: the knowledge of how the work is done is written nowhere and lives only in a few people’s heads.
You usually see the result of this once it is too late. The key person in the warehouse who knew the stock for ten years leaves and nobody knows how orders were placed or where from. Or the bookkeeper who kept every password and procedure in their head walks out and the whole financial side stops. In that state you own the business but you do not own its knowledge. The knowledge belongs to the people and walks out of the door with them. This is exactly a business’s dependence on people, only this time on a few key staff rather than on the owner, and the way out is the same: separating the knowledge from the person and putting it on paper.
Two mistakes: nothing gets documented, or everything does and it dies
With documentation, businesses usually fall into one of two traps. The first is the one described above: nothing is written, everything is verbal and held in people’s heads, on the excuse that we are small and have no time for this. That business stays upright as long as its people stay put, but the first change of staff sets off a crisis.
The second trap is subtler, and it feels like doing the right thing. One day they decide to document everything, they assign someone or hire a consultant, and a few months later they receive a fat binder or a hundred-page file with every procedure in it. The problem is that this document dies the day it is written, because nobody opens it while working, it is far more detailed than anyone has the patience to read, and the first time a procedure changes nobody goes back to update the file. A document that does not get used is exactly as useless as not having one, it just creates the illusion that the job is done.
What to document first? The job only one person knows
The escape from both traps is the same: do not try to document everything. Good documentation is selective, not comprehensive. The criterion is simple. Ask yourself which jobs would be left stranded if a particular person were away today, and document those first. A job five people know and that gets done every day is not the priority. The priority is the job only one person knows, where nobody else would even know where to start.
There is a second list that matters just as much: the decisions that always end up coming back to you. In a shop, for instance, how much discount can be given to a customer, or on what terms a return is accepted, is usually written nowhere, which is why the owner has to be asked every single time. When you put those few rules on paper, you are in effect taking the decision off your own desk and handing it to a role, and that is no longer just documentation. It is what tells you whether that job has become a system. Bear in mind, though, that a document only means something when it is already clear how far each role’s authority goes, otherwise you write a procedure nobody owns, and that is where documentation ties into organisational structure.
How to document so it actually gets used
Once you know what to document, the next question is the form, and here a few simple rules make the difference between a living document and a dead binder:
- The document should be written by the person who does the job, not by a manager who only imagines it. Someone who does the work every day knows details that would never occur to a manager.
- Pick the simplest form that transfers the job. Sometimes a ten-line checklist is enough, and sometimes a three-minute video shot on a phone while doing the work beats ten pages of text.
- Put the document where the person can reach it while working, not in some lost folder. A document that cannot be found when it is needed may as well not exist.
- Keep the document alive. Every time a procedure changes, the document gets updated then and there, or a few months later it becomes something nobody trusts.
There is one final test for whether your document came out well: take a newcomer, put the document in their hands, and see whether they can do the job without asking you or that key member of staff anything. If they have to come and ask every couple of lines, the document is still incomplete and the knowledge is still in people’s heads.
Where to start
If you want to take one step this week, do not go buying software or designing forms. First write a short list of the jobs only one person knows, where your work stops if that person is not there tomorrow. Then from that list pick the riskiest one, and ask that person, the next time they do it, to write it out step by step or record a simple video. That first document is a small experiment that shows you how workable this is and where you had hidden knowledge.
Documentation is in the end one piece of a bigger job: business systemization, separating the work, the knowledge and the decisions from people so the business is not tied to anyone being there. If you want to know which thing should be documented first, we find it together in a free diagnostic session.