I've built documentation systems for a lot of companies at this point. Consulting firms, government agencies, startups, mid-market shops. Every single time, the script is the same.
You come in to help with operations. You talk to the team. You collect notes. You do interviews, just getting the lay of the land, the starting point for the transformation. You read whatever documents exist (if they exist). And then someone says the magic words: "We need to get this all written down so everyone's working off the same sheet of music."
So you write it down.
And nobody reads it.
The most recent time was at my full-time job. We were in the middle of a reorg, and I was documenting operations for the new structure. I'm sitting there in SharePoint, organizing files, writing clear step-by-step guides… and I could not shake the feeling that I was building something I knew for certain no one was ever going to look at once it got approved.
I'd been here before. A few years earlier, at a major consulting firm. We were redesigning how the firm did business. We were going to make it faster, more profitable, and genuinely better. I built the docs myself because every template I found was bloated with signatory sections and governance-theater boilerplate. Mine had everything the reader needed and nothing they didn't: each process, each step, each person, annotated screenshots, "so what?" statements throughout.
Then I started sorting everything into a clean SharePoint directory and it hit me like a slap. I'd been on the receiving end of this exact effort at other companies. I knew, from lived experience, that in a few months these docs would be outdated and in the interim the number of people who actually read them would round down to zero.
I finished them anyway. I even turned them into PowerPoints at my manager's request, to make them more "visually engaging." I'm certain no one has looked at them since.
Back at the reorg job, a few weeks in, I got an email from another director about "ISO process documentation." First I'd heard of it.
Great, I thought. More context.
Except it was useless. Completely different format. Written for auditors, not for the people actually doing the work. SOPs that took 40 hours to build and were used zero times. Compliance docs that check boxes but don't transfer knowledge. Version 7 in someone's email, version 3 on the wiki.
That's when something clicked. This wasn't a me problem. It wasn't a discipline problem. It wasn't even a documentation problem.
It was a design problem.
There are millions of templates, scores of tools, and dozens of methodologies for process documentation. And none of them solve the actual problem, because the actual problem isn't writing things down. It's what happens after you write them down.
When someone needs an answer, they don't think: "Let me open the Operations Manual." They don't think: "Let me dig through SharePoint."
They think: "How do I get the answer fastest?"
So the business runs on "ask Sarah" or "ping Jerry" or "check with the boss." Not because the docs are bad. Because the docs are inert. Hard to find. Hard to trust. Hard to keep current. And completely separated from the moment where someone actually needs them.
People do the only rational thing: they route around the docs. Every time.
We inherited the document from a world where you printed things and filed them in a binder. Then we moved the filing cabinet to the cloud and called it transformation.
That realization is what started me down the road I'm on now. The document was never really the problem. It was the symptom. The deeper thing is that the whole operation runs through one person, and a business that runs through one person isn't really owned by anyone. It's leased back to you, one question at a time.
I'll be writing every week about how that trap gets built, and how it comes apart.
But I want to hear from you first. Have you ever built something at work — a system, a doc library, a process manual — that you knew in your gut nobody was going to use? What happened? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response.
— Danny