When a work process gets named after a person—Karen's spreadsheet, Jenna's approval—your organization is running on undocumented knowledge. The speaker calls this operational risk and suggests a drift check to surface these hidden dependencies before someone leaves and the process breaks.
If your process has a first name on it, I have questions. You know what I mean. Use Karen's spreadsheet. Mike knows how to get around that. Ask Jenna before you send it. At some point, that stopped being a little inside knowledge and became how the work actually gets done, which is fine until Karen goes to Cabo and suddenly half the company develops a fever. That's the stuff that gets my attention, not the process you wrote down, the little things everyone depends on so much they've stopped noticing them. If a name immediately popped into your head, take the drift check. I'll be curious what else has quietly become normal.
