Why the classic handover fails
The handover lasts two weeks and goes to open files, passwords and paperwork. What really mattered — the ear that knows when a pump runs badly, the way to restart a line after an emergency stop — is never written down, because nobody asked and the person does not know it is rare.
So the question is not "how do we make the expert write before leaving". It is: what do we depend on without knowing it?
The four steps that work
1. Spot what leaves with the person
Attach each piece of knowledge to the tasks it serves, then record who masters it, from 0 to 5. Knowledge held by a single person then shows up by itself: the key-person risk.
2. Measure the risk, do not guess it
Risk combines vulnerability (how many people know, how hard it is to pass on) and relevance (how often it is needed, what it cost to acquire). The method is published: it can be debated in a meeting.
3. Train a successor, with a dated plan
The action plan names a pair, sessions and a deadline before the departure. The internal academy turns sessions into a path where each level is validated by a test.
4. Prove it is done
Risk only drops when the successor has been assessed at the required level. It is never declared "closed" by hand: that is what stops people from feeling safe too early.
What it looks like on an industrial site
On a 1,900-person mining group (demonstration data), the five-year retirement wave hits 161 people and 33 pieces of knowledge have a single holder. The decision board ranks them by urgency and proposes, for each, the closest successor in skills and structure.
What KnowledgeCapital is not
Neither a document management system nor a wiki: both assume the knowledge has already been written. Here the first job is to find out where it lives and how exposed you are.
Documents that already exist stay where they are: connectors read SharePoint, your document management system, Notion or the intranet, and link them to knowledge — which immediately shows which critical knowledge has no document before the departure. To start from a blank space, follow the set-up order.