Record the work once, write down the steps, and put a date on both.
Part two of three.
Friday, 6:50 p.m. The senior boys were up by one with six minutes left, and the principal was standing at the fence because she had told them she would come.
A shot went wide. She stepped back to give the parents room and did not look down. Her heel found a hole in the grass.
She felt the knee go before she heard it.
Monday, 5:15 p.m. Surgery is at 7:30 tomorrow morning. The surgeon has told her to plan on several weeks away from work, and she will spend the first few days on the couch with her leg up. Her laptop sits closed on the desk and her bag is open beside it.
She has been arguing with herself since Saturday.
Take it. Nobody else knows how the state compliance report gets filed, or which Friday it is due.
Leave it. The surgeon said she needs time to recover.
Take it. Nobody else knows which board member gets the call before a tuition exception, or where the accreditation binder really lives. And she is going to be sitting on a couch for days.
Leave it.
She puts the laptop in the bag. She takes it out. She sets it on the desk, then picks it up again.
None of it is written down anywhere. She never needed to. She is the system.
The day that person is out
A system that lives in one head works until that person is gone. Then it stops, and the next person is required to build it from the ground up.
Gone can mean an injury, a sick week, a resignation, a family emergency, or a Friday you finally take off. Each time, the school finds out what it was running on.
The cost starts before anyone leaves. Everything only you know has to go through you. Your staff learn to stop at your door. Your day fills with questions that have the same answers every time, and the school cannot move faster than you can reply.
You also cannot see this clearly from the inside. You have never been without your own knowledge, so you do not know which parts of it carry weight. That is insider blindness.
Start with what would stop
You cannot capture everything. That is too overwhelming, so start with one question. If you were out for three weeks starting Monday, what would stop? Call it the out-Monday test.
Take the word stop literally. Billing would stop. Re-enrollment contracts would not go out. Nobody would call the substitute list.
Run it on yourself first. Your head is the hardest one to see, so give it ten minutes and a legal pad. Then run it on the two or three people who carry the most: your office manager, your business manager, your athletic director. Ask each one what would stop if they were out. Write down what they say.
Put your answers and theirs on one page. Circle the three systems where the answer is “everything stops.” Those come first. The rest can wait.
Record the work, then write down the steps
When a principal decides to document a system, the plan is usually a manual. The manual goes on the summer to-do list and stays there. The person who knows the system has no time to write about it, and describing a task you do without thinking is slow work.
Record the work instead. The first time the task comes up, whoever owns it, you or a staff member, does it as usual with the recording running. A screen recording works, or a phone propped on a stack of books. They talk through what they are doing and why. Rough is fine. Nobody has to edit it.
Once is usually enough. Hand the recording to someone who has never done the task and ask her to run it. Wherever she gets stuck is the part still living only in a head. Fill that gap with one sentence or one more recording, and stop.
When it works, write down the steps together. One page at most. The recording shows the work and the person talking it through. The steps are the quick refresher.
Date every recording
Last week’s piece made the case that systems persist by default. A recording persists too. Left alone, it becomes next year’s pink form, the supply form last week’s principal kept initialing.
Give each recording and its steps a review date in the file name, set for next October. When the date arrives, ask the two questions from last week. Why does this system exist? What result does it produce?
If nobody can answer the first two, retire the system and the recording with it.
If it passes, ask one more. What has changed since this was recorded? An undated recording gets followed long after it stopped being right.
This week
Ask yourself what would stop if you were out for three weeks starting Monday. Ten minutes, a legal pad.
Ask the two or three people who carry the most what would stop if they were out. Tell them why you are asking.
Put the answers on one page. Circle the three systems where the answer is “everything stops.”
Put a recording on the calendar for each one, starting with the next time it comes up. Do not stage a special session.
Give each recording to someone new to the task. Let her try it, then write the steps together.
Save the recording and the steps where someone besides you can open them.
Put next October in both file names as the review date.
Start with the three systems where everything stops. Record each one, hand it to someone who has never done the work, and write down where she gets stuck. That is the week.
Do that and the principal could have left the laptop on her desk and gone home confident the school would keep running.
