What Happens When the Only Person Who Knows the Process Leaves?

Every organization has a Simone.

She knows where the approved board minutes are, which version of the bylaws is current, and why the board changed that policy three years ago. She knows that the Governance Committee meets the second Tuesday of the month except in August, that the Board Chair likes to review the draft minutes before they go to the Executive Committee, and that the folder labeled "FINAL" contains three versions but only one of them is actually final.

When someone can't find something, they ask Simone. When a new board member has a question about how something works, they ask Simone. When somebody says, "Didn't the board already decide this?" Everyone looks at Simone.

And most of the time, Simone knows.

Which is wonderful. Until Simone leaves.

What Happens When Institutional Knowledge Walks Out the Door?

When the person who holds institutional knowledge leaves, questions that used to take thirty seconds to answer become surprisingly difficult.

It might be a retirement, resignation, unexpected leave, or even a two-week vacation at exactly the wrong time. Where are the approved minutes? Which version is final? Who reviews the committee minutes? Did the board ever formally approve that policy? Why do we do it this way? Who needs to see the draft before it goes into the board packet?

What seemed like a perfectly functional system starts to look very different.

The problem wasn't Simone. Simone was terrific. The problem was that the organization had confused having an experienced person with having a resilient process. Those aren't the same thing.

Why Is the "Only One Person Knows" Problem So Common?

This happens because knowledge accumulates gradually, one small handoff at a time, until an organization doesn't notice it's built an entire system around a single person.

I've worked with boards and board-governed organizations for more than 30 years, and I've seen versions of this over and over. Sometimes the keeper of the process is an executive assistant. Sometimes it's the Executive Director, a longtime Board Secretary, or a volunteer who has been around forever and somehow became the organization's unofficial historian.

Nobody makes a deliberate decision that one person should become the only person who understands how the governance process works. It just happens.

One task gets handed over, then another. Simone figures out a better way to organize the board packets. She creates the folder structure. She learns what the Board Chair expects. She discovers that the committee chairs need a reminder every month or their reports won't arrive. She knows where the old records are and which of the many versions is the one that was actually approved.

Five years later, the organization has what looks like a functioning system. Except much of the system lives in Simone's head.

That's a problem even if she has absolutely no plans to leave.

Why Is Single-Person Dependency a Governance Risk?

Single-person dependency is a governance risk because the information at stake isn't administrative, it's the history of the organization's decisions.

Who approved what, and when? What authority was delegated? What did the board decide about an issue that has suddenly resurfaced? Was a policy formally adopted or simply discussed? What commitments were made, and who was supposed to follow up?

Good governance depends on being able to answer those questions. Yet in many organizations, the answers are scattered across minutes, board packets, email threads, shared drives and people's memories.

As long as the same people stay involved, that can appear to work surprisingly well. It's when someone leaves that an organization discovers whether it has institutional memory or simply people with good memories.

Are Your Minutes Actually Your Organization's Memory?

Yes, but only if someone who wasn't in the room can understand what the board decided by reading them.

We tend to think about board minutes as a record of the meeting that just happened. That's true, but it's only half the story. Good board minutes are also a record for people who weren't in the room, including people who haven't joined the organization yet.

Imagine an Executive Director three years from now trying to understand why the board approved a major change in strategy. Or a new Board Chair wondering whether an issue has been discussed before. Or a committee trying to determine what authority the board gave it. Or an auditor asking when a particular action was approved.

The people sitting around the table today know the context. The people sitting around the table three years from now won't.

That's why minutes matter. They allow organizational knowledge to outlive the people who currently hold it.

A useful test is to ask: Could someone who wasn't there understand what the board decided?

They don't need to know everything everyone said or every argument and tangent along the way. But they should be able to understand what mattered: what was decided, what was approved, what action was taken and what someone coming later would need to know.

That's institutional memory. When it's captured well, the organization doesn't have to rely on Simone to remember.

Is a Folder Full of Minutes the Same as Institutional Memory?

No. Institutional memory requires reliable records, a consistent process, and a way for future leaders to actually find what they need, not just a folder of files.

I've seen organizations with years of beautifully organized minutes that still struggle to answer a basic question about a past board decision. Sometimes the minutes are so vague that they don't provide the answer. Sometimes they're so detailed that finding the answer requires reading pages of meeting narrative. Sometimes board and committee records are stored in different places, or nobody is quite sure whether the document in the folder is the draft or the approved version.

And sometimes the answer is technically there, but finding it requires an archaeological expedition through six years of PDFs.

That's record storage. Institutional memory is more useful than that.

How Do You Know If Your Organization Depends Too Much on One Person?

Run what I call the Simone Test: imagine Simone leaves this Friday, and see how many basic questions your organization can still answer without her.

Could someone else prepare the minutes for your next board meeting? Not just open the template, but know what belongs in the minutes, how much detail is expected, who reviews the draft and how the final version gets approved?

Could you find the approved minutes from a meeting three years ago and be certain you had the final approved version rather than a draft?

Could you find a specific past board decision, a policy change, major expenditure or leadership decision, and determine what the board actually decided?

Does someone besides Simone understand the process well enough to step in and keep things moving?

And are the unwritten rules written down anywhere? Who reviews what? Where do records live? What happens to recordings? How are corrections handled? Who makes sure approved minutes are actually archived?

If those questions make you uncomfortable, that's useful information. You've found a resilience problem before Simone handed in her notice.

Is the Minutes Process Only the Minute Taker's Responsibility?

No. One person may be responsible for preparing the minutes, but the Board Chair, Board Secretary, Executive Director and board itself all share responsibility for the reliability of the record.

If your organization has essentially said, "Simone handles the minutes," and nobody else knows much about what happens after the meeting, that's worth changing.

Not everyone needs to become an expert in minute taking. But leadership should know whether the process is reliable, consistent and transferable.

You wouldn't want your payroll system to depend entirely on one person's memory. You wouldn't want only one person to know how to access the organization's bank accounts. Your governance records deserve some of the same thinking.

What Happens When Someone Unexpectedly Inherits the Minutes?

They usually discover that having the previous minutes as a reference doesn't teach them the judgment required to write the next set.

Someone hands over the folder. You pull up last month's minutes, then another set, then another. You can see the format. What you can't see is how anyone got there: how the previous secretary decided what mattered, how much of a twenty-minute discussion belonged in the record, which details could safely be left out, what the organization's standard actually was.

The finished documents show what the minutes are supposed to look like. They can't teach the process and judgment that produced them. That's what happens when we transfer the files without transferring the knowledge.

I've told one person's version of this in full: I Didn't Know I Was the Board Secretary.

Can AI Solve the Institutional Memory Problem?

AI can reduce the effort of producing minutes, but it can't build the governance process that determines what belongs in them.

If a meeting is recorded, AI can dramatically reduce the work required to turn that meeting into a first draft. A new Board Secretary doesn't have to be a world-class note taker on day one. An Executive Director who unexpectedly loses administrative support doesn't necessarily have to reconstruct an entire meeting from handwritten notes.

But someone still needs to know what belongs in the official record, who reviews the draft, who approves it, where the approved version lives, what happens to the recording afterward and how someone will find the decision two years from now.

AI can reduce dependence on one person's ability to produce the minutes. The organization still needs a process for managing its institutional record.

How Do You Build a Minutes Process That Survives Staff Turnover?

Document what happens after the meeting ends, make sure more than one person can find the records, define what "good minutes" means, and periodically test whether your institutional memory actually works.

Start by documenting what actually happens between the end of a meeting and final approval. Who creates the first draft? Who reviews it? Who makes corrections? Who approves it? Where does the final version live? What happens to recordings, transcripts and working drafts? This doesn't need to become a 30-page manual. One page is considerably better than someone's memory.

Next, make sure more than one person can find the records. Ask someone who doesn't normally manage the minutes to find a particular set of approved minutes. Don't help them. See what happens. You'll learn a lot.

It's also worth defining what "good minutes" mean in your organization. A template isn't enough. People need to understand what belongs in the record and what doesn't. Otherwise, a new person can faithfully reproduce the format while having no idea how to make the judgments behind it.

Finally, test your institutional memory. Pick an important issue your board addressed two or three years ago and try to determine what was decided, when it was decided, whether follow-up was assigned and where the official record lives. Pay attention to how long it takes.

That exercise tells you much more than whether your files are neatly organized. It tells you whether your organization's memory actually works.

Does Building Resilience Mean Simone Isn't Important?

No. The goal isn't to make Simone less valuable, it's to stop requiring her to be indispensable.

There's a danger in conversations about succession and systems that we make expertise sound like a problem. It isn't. You want Simone. You want the person who knows the organization deeply, spots inconsistencies, remembers history and understands how things really work. That's enormously valuable.

A strong system captures what she knows, makes the routine parts of her work repeatable, preserves the decisions she helped document, and allows someone else to step in when necessary without starting from scratch.

It also means Simone doesn't have to remain the human search engine for the entire organization.

The Question Isn't Whether Simone Will Leave

Eventually, everyone does. Board Chairs rotate off. Board Secretaries finish their terms. Executive Directors take new jobs. Executive assistants retire. Volunteers move on. That's normal.

The governance question is what happens next.

If someone can open a shared drive, find years of reliable approved records, follow a documented process and keep moving, you've built resilience.

If everyone starts calling Simone, you haven't.

So don't wait for a retirement announcement, resignation or unexpected absence to find out. Ask the question now: what would happen if the only person who really knows how this works wasn't here tomorrow?

If you don't like the answer, you have an opportunity to fix it while Simone is still around to help. Because the most valuable thing Simone can leave behind isn't a perfectly organized folder. It's an organization that remembers what it knows.