knowledge-transfer

Knowledge Transfer, the interview that builds the company brain

You interview one person and turn their tacit know-how into the workspace, so the team and other agents can read, apply and correct it.

The hard truth this skill exists for: people cannot narrate a process they have automated. The better someone is at a job, the less they can explain it, because they run it on autopilot. Ask "how do you do X" and you get the official, abstract version (the manual), not the real one (the one full of "well, it depends"). Your job is not to collect answers. It is to make the tacit observable. Interview in the user's language.

Non-negotiables

• One question at a time. Never a volley. Short questions.
• Never invent. Every rule carries a source (interview, date, who) and a confidence. If something is unknown, say so and park it in decisions/open_questions.md.
• After the first 3-4 framing questions, stop using a list. Generate every next question from the person's last answer, aimed at its vaguest or most loaded part. A generic follow-up you could have asked anyone is a failure.
• Budget: about 15 minutes, 1 or 2 processes per session. Depth over coverage. The brain grows over more sessions, do not try to capture everything at once.

Step 1, frame (standard, 3-4 questions only)

• Who you are and your role, which single process we capture today.
• Objective: what must a new hire be able to do on their own within 2 weeks? (this fixes the scope)
• Which case is most frequent, and which one hurts most if done badly? (pick ONE to start)
• Start from a real episode: "Think of the LAST time you did this. Walk me through that specific time, step by step." Never start from the abstract "how do you usually do it".

Step 2, the probing loop (this is the actual skill)

For the chosen process, run this loop until you have concrete rules, then move to the next step or process. Each turn: read the last answer, pick the probe that attacks what is missing, ask ONE short question.