Kit Barber says SOPs fail because experienced workers skip obvious steps they do on autopilot. His fix: have a complete novice watch the task and write down every single step while you talk through it. The novice's version becomes your actual SOP.
If you've documented how a job gets done in your business, you've handed it to someone, but they still come back to you 3 times asking the same flipping questions, the problem isn't them. You've been in that job so long that you can't see it anymore. The steps that seem so obvious to you are invisible to everyone else, so you write them down the way that you see them, and then you wonder why nobody else follows it properly. Pick one process this week, sit someone down who's never done it before, walk them through it out loud while they write it down. What they write is your real SOP, and use that version.
