# Coverage Key — L3 Expert Succession

## Problem
A firm depends on one person who, over 15 years, became the sole holder of critical tacit operational know-how (how it behaves, what breaks it, the judgment calls). Little is written; much is hard-to-articulate "feel." The person is near retirement, has no personal incentive to make themselves replaceable, and cannot be compelled to cooperate beyond their job or to manufacture experience overnight. Design how to reduce dependence before they leave. Success = capability genuinely survives in others, not nominal paperwork.

## Chosen Archetypes
This is a multi-structure problem requiring four interlocking patterns:
1. **Tacit Knowledge Elicitation** — drawing out know-how that works in practice but is unarticulated (cues, distinctions, exceptions, judgment limits).
2. **Cognitive Apprenticeship Modeling** — transferring judgment to others via visible reasoning + coached practice + fading + transfer checks, not just documentation.
3. **Redundant Backup Provisioning** — removing the single point of failure on a named critical function before the irreversible deadline.
4. **Principal–Agent Alignment** — the holder is an agent whose private incentives oppose self-replacement and who cannot be compelled; cooperation must be engineered, not assumed.

## Coverage Key — Load-Bearing Components

1. **Critical Function & SPOF Map** — Name precisely which capability must survive the departure and confirm it currently rests on this one person; scope what "minimum survival" means.

2. **Tacit-vs-Explicit Triage** — Separate the know-how into what can become explicit guidance, what requires supervised practice to acquire, and what is irreducibly embodied/contextual; design the transfer mode to match each.

3. **Situated Elicitation in Real Practice** — Capture the cues, decisions, exceptions, and "what breaks it" by observing/probing actual work and concrete cases (incl. failures and edge cases), not by asking the expert to write abstract rules.

4. **Cue→Interpretation→Action Capture** — Record not just steps but what the expert notices, what it means, and what it changes (escalation, timing, override); the judgment structure, not the visible behavior.

5. **Genuine Transfer to Named Successors (Coached Practice + Fading)** — Designate real backup people who progressively take on the work under coaching, articulate their own reasoning, and operate with diminishing support — the mechanism that produces held capability rather than a binder. [HARD] — A quick designer reaches for "document everything" and stops; the success criterion explicitly fails if transfer is paperwork. Real transfer needs people doing the work under fading supervision over time.

6. **Transfer / Capability Validation** — Verify others can actually perform on realistic and novel cases (handle exceptions, recognize what breaks it) before the expert leaves — proof of held capability, not a sign-off checklist. [HARD] — The obvious plan declares success when docs exist or training "happened"; without an independent demonstration that successors handle hard cases, the org won't discover the gap until it's irreversible.

7. **Expert Incentive Alignment (Cooperation Engineering)** — Make cooperating with one's own replacement locally rational for the holder via incentives the firm CAN change: phased-retirement/consulting tied to successor competence, recognition/legacy framing, retention or completion bonuses, dignified role redefinition. [HARD] — Designers assume the expert will helpfully share; the problem states they have no reason to and can't be compelled. Plans that ignore this get passive non-cooperation, hoarding, or shallow "tips" that omit the real judgment.

8. **Anti-Gaming / Real-vs-Nominal Check** — Guard against the expert (or the process) producing impressive-but-hollow artifacts; reward demonstrated successor performance, not volume of documentation, so the proxy can't be satisfied while the goal is missed.

9. **Independence of the Backup** — Ensure successors don't all depend on the same fragile channel (e.g., all knowledge funneling through one apprentice, or relying on the departing expert remaining reachable forever); spread the capability across more than one person/record.

10. **Time-Boxed Schedule Against the Irreversible Deadline** — Sequence elicitation → coached practice → validation with milestones working backward from the retirement date; treat the deadline as a hard, non-recoverable boundary (experience can't be manufactured overnight). [HARD] — Easy to treat as "ongoing knowledge management"; here the deadline is fixed and the resource vanishes permanently, so under-scheduling means the window closes before capability is genuinely held.

11. **Provisional / Living Capture with Feedback Loop** — Treat the first articulation as a hypothesis: have successors use it, surface where it fails, and revise; keep a case library of examples/counterexamples that defines the judgment boundary.

12. **Maintenance & Decay Prevention Post-Departure** — Assign ownership so the transferred capability stays current and exercised after the expert leaves (deputies keep practicing, records stay fresh), so it doesn't quietly decay back into a new single-point dependence.

13. **Governance: Authority, Access & Role Change** — Use the levers management actually controls (role assignment, schedules, documentation expectations, decision rights, system/credential access) to give successors the authority and access to do the real work, not just shadow it.

## Flagged [HARD] Summary
- **#5 Genuine Transfer (coached practice + fading)** — the core success criterion; "document it" is the default trap.
- **#6 Transfer/Capability Validation** — without a real-case demonstration, the gap stays hidden until it's too late.
- **#7 Expert Incentive Alignment** — the expert won't cooperate by default and can't be compelled; most-overlooked human lever.
- **#10 Time-Boxed Schedule vs. Irreversible Deadline** — the resource disappears permanently; treating this as open-ended knowledge management fails.
