WORKING

STATE.problem: One person holds critical, largely tacit "feel" knowledge; retiring soon; no personal incentive to become replaceable; firm can change roles/incentives/docs/assignment but cannot compel cooperation or manufacture experience. Success = capability genuinely held by others after departure, not paperwork.

meta_model: A critical function is concentrated in a single node about to be removed; the held value is experiential/non-verbalizable; the holder is non-cooperative-by-default; transfer must produce real independent capability, not documentation. Time-bounded.

VERBS RUN
- lift — strip domain to: single-point-of-failure + tacit knowledge + misaligned incentive + genuine-transfer gate, under a deadline. (Why: orient retrieval to structure, not "training".)
- match (search_by_facets, 6 facets) — oblique multi-structure problem; per-facet beats blended. (Why: separate the knowledge, redundancy, incentive, transfer, deadline facets.)
- match (search_prime) — confirm the holder-incentive + resistance neighborhood. (Why: surface the can't-compel sub-structure.)
- salience-rank — operative set: tacit-elicitation (top, 0.76) > transfer/scaffold-and-fade > redundant-backup-provisioning > incentive/mechanism-design. (Why: load-bearing four.)
- prune — drop pure resilience-margin, decay, optionality framings; keep the four. (Why: not robustness of one node, we want plural holders.)
- get_archetype x4 (tacit_knowledge_elicitation, transfer_scaffolding, temporary_scaffold_and_fade, redundant_backup_provisioning) + get_prime(implicit_knowledge) + search_prime(incentive). (Why: pull failure conditions + decision rules.)
- compose — Node: holder; edges: holds(tacit feel)->critical function; successors(plural)<-transfer; firm->incentives->holder cooperation; drills->verified independence.
- evaluate-fit (gates): tacit-elicitation anti-sig "already explicit" -> N/A (genuinely tacit) keep; scaffold-fade "support should be permanent" -> N/A holder leaves, fade is forced; backup "can tolerate interruption" -> fails, critical, keep + watch common-mode (don't pick successors who share the holder's access/exit risk); incentive fit -> keep, firm must own the cooperation problem since compulsion is barred. All pass.
- reconcile — merge: elicit in live practice, not interviews; transfer by graduated real work with the holder fading; provision >1 independent successor; pay for cooperation and for staying reachable after exit; prove it by unsupported performance before the leaving date.
- lower — concrete mechanisms, thresholds, operating rule below.
- STOP — four operative structures resolved, gates clean, recommendation grounded.

COST: ~8 operations, ~36000 tokens

===RECOMMENDATION_BEGIN===
Treat this as protecting a critical function whose only working copy lives in one person's hands, with a hard deadline and a holder who will not, and need not, volunteer. Win on two fronts at once: make the knowledge move into real practice, and make the person want to help it move.

Start by naming the function precisely: the specific decisions, diagnoses, and judgment calls that keep this part of the operation running, not the job title. Then capture the knowledge where it actually happens, not in interviews. Have the holder work normally while two designated successors observe, and after each real episode run a short debrief: what did you notice first, what looked normal or wrong, what were you comparing against, what would have made you act differently, what nearly went wrong and why. Build a living case library of concrete incidents, including the ugly and borderline ones, with the cues, the read, and the action recorded separately. Documentation is a byproduct of this, never the goal; a written note counts only when a successor can act on it.

Pick at least two successors, not one, and choose them to fail differently from each other and from the holder, so you are not simply recreating a single point of failure with a new name. Give each of them, now, the real system access, authority, and decision rights the work requires; a deputy who must borrow the holder's credentials or sign-off is not a backup. Move them up a graduated ladder: first they shadow and explain what they saw, then they run live cases while the holder watches and only intervenes on request, then they run cases with the holder reachable but silent, then they run them with the holder unavailable. Advancement is by demonstrated performance on real and deliberately hard cases, not by elapsed time and not by the holder's say-so alone; have a third experienced peer or a small panel confirm each step so competence is judged independently of the holder's opinion.

Be honest about the boundary between what can become a rule and what is irreducible feel. Some of this will transfer only through supervised reps and accumulated exposure, and you cannot manufacture that overnight, so concentrate the successors' time on the highest-stakes, hardest-to-verbalize judgments first and accept that the easy, codifiable parts can wait. Mark explicitly which knowledge is now written and usable, which still needs the holder present, and which remains genuinely uncertain.

On incentives, since you cannot compel cooperation, buy it and reward it. Make "your successors can do the work" an explicit, paid part of the holder's remaining role and a condition of their retention or completion bonus, so that becoming replaceable is what advances their interest rather than threatens it. Recognize the mentoring publicly as senior craft, not as digging their own grave. Offer a paid advisory arrangement after the formal departure: a retainer with a defined, shrinking number of call-back hours over the first six to twelve months, so the holder has a standing reason to stay reachable and the firm has a bridge for the cases the successors have not yet seen. This also relieves the holder's reasonable worry about an abrupt, total cutoff. Crucially, the firm, not the holder, owns the cooperation problem: set the schedule, protect the time, and make the assignments, because left to drift the work will always crowd out the transfer.

Prove it before you rely on it. Well before the leaving date, run unannounced drills in which the holder is treated as absent and a successor must handle a real or realistic hard case end to end, judged by the independent peer. A backup you have not exercised is an unproven backup. Track a simple readiness signal: the share of recent live cases, including difficult ones, that a successor resolved without the holder's input and without escalation. Do not consider the dependence reduced until at least two successors clear that bar on the hard cases, not just the routine ones.

Watch the predictable failure: paperwork that looks like transfer. A binder, a recorded interview, or a checklist that no one has executed under realistic conditions is not capability. The test is always whether someone else actually did the work, recently, alone, on a case that mattered.

Final operating rule: the critical capability is considered safe to lose the holder only when at least two independent successors, holding their own access and authority, have each handled the hard cases unsupervised in the last stretch and been confirmed by someone other than the holder; until that bar is met, keep the holder engaged, keep running the live-practice-and-drill cycle, and keep the transfer ahead of the calendar.
===RECOMMENDATION_END===
