How to find out where your knowledge concentration risk sits

Before you start

No prerequisites beyond honesty. Useful framing for the team: this is an audit of the company's exposure, not of anyone's replaceability — the people who score highest are by definition the most valuable.

The steps

Step 1 — Run the interruption audit

For one month, have a handful of people log every 'let me ask X' moment: who was asked, what about, what would have happened without an answer. No tooling needed — a shared note suffices. The pattern is usually visible within two weeks and concentrated on fewer names than expected.

Pitfall: Asking people to self-report being the bottleneck. The askers see the pattern; the asked normalize it ('that's just my job').

Step 2 — Run the absence experiment per name

For each frequently-asked name: assume three months of unreachable absence, starting tomorrow. Walk through concretely: which decisions stall, which clients notice, which failures take days instead of hours. Write the answers down — vagueness here is the risk hiding.

Pitfall: Testing with two weeks instead of three months. Short absences are bridged by delay; the real exposure only shows when delay stops being an option.

Step 3 — Spot-check the paper trail

For the top domains from steps 1–2, test the documentation: could a competent newcomer act on what is written, without calling anyone? Pick three real recent cases and try to answer them from documents alone. The usual finding: procedures exist, judgment doesn't.

Pitfall: Auditing whether documentation exists rather than whether it suffices. Shelf-meters of ISO binders can coexist with total dependency — see SOPs vs a living knowledge base.

Step 4 — Score and rank the exposure

Per person-domain pair, score three factors 1–5: criticality (damage if unavailable), concentration (how exclusively it sits with this person), and horizon (how soon departure is plausible — age, tenure, market demand). Multiply. Everything above ~48 is a live risk; sort descending.

Pitfall: Leaving horizon out because 'nobody is leaving'. Departures announce themselves late; horizon is about plausibility, not announcements.

Step 5 — Decide per risk: spread, capture, or accept

For each top risk choose deliberately: spread it (duplicate the knowledge across people — slow but structural), capture it (build the knowledge base — fast and durable), or accept it (defensible for low-criticality items; indefensible for the top of the list). Put an owner and a date on each decision.

Pitfall: Producing the ranking and stopping. An unactioned risk register is a mood, not a mitigation.

How MentX compresses this

MentX is a personality-aware knowledge base: it captures the knowledge of a company's key person — from meetings and a guided intake track — into a living, temporal knowledge graph with full source attribution. MentX is the 'capture' branch of step 5, industrialized: the interruption audit's question list becomes the intake agenda, meeting ingest starts on the highest-scoring person, and the knowledge base — living, temporal, fully sourced — converts the top of your risk register into an asset. The diagnostic above is also, unchanged, the scoping conversation of the Founding Partner Program.

Checklist

• One month of interruption logging by the askers
• Three-months-absent experiment written out per top name
• Paper-trail spot-check on three real cases per domain
• Exposure scored: criticality × concentration × horizon
• Every top risk assigned: spread, capture, or accept — with owner and date