Coming December 2026
Which model, which platform, which framework — when the question that actually determines success is what the company knows about how it does its work, and whether that knowledge exists in a form that anyone — or anything — other than a seasoned employee can act on.
In documents that look complete and aren't. In the heads of experienced people who cannot fully articulate what they know. In habits of work no one ever thought to write down. None of them are usable by an AI agent — or a new hire — on day one.
An AI agent executes exactly what it has been told. Where the instructions are incomplete, it does not fail visibly — it produces plausible-looking output that is wrong in ways only an expert would notice. The cost surfaces weeks later — as errors discovered downstream, customers who noticed first, and rework no one budgeted for.
See how the work flows end to end before going near any detail: what triggers it, its major phases, its decision points, and the ways real runs differ from the clean diagram.
Capture real work as it actually happens — screen-recorded, narrated. Performance reveals what description leaves out; the narration is where tacit knowledge leaks into view.
Six questions at every significant step, engaging the expert's reaction rather than introspection — including the single most productive question in the method: what would a new hire get wrong on day one?
The output is not another SOP. It is a knowledge base of atomic, retrievable entries — one decision, one procedure, one failure mode, one escalation criterion each — structured for the way AI systems and humans under pressure actually consume knowledge. Why that structure matters as much as the content is the argument of Chapter 5.
Founder, owner, or principal — whatever the title, you run a services business where the work follows patterns, and you suspect those patterns could be handled by something other than your most experienced people — if only what they know existed anywhere outside their heads.
You have been handed "AI transformation" and you already know the SOPs will not survive contact with it. You need a method, a sequence, and a defensible answer to "why isn't this deployed yet?"
You are the one who will sit with the experts and pull the knowledge out — curious, patient, and outside the work. The book is the method; the Field Kit is your working copy.
Nine questions — an honest read on where your organization stands, mapped to the chapters that address your biggest gaps.
Eleven working sheets for your first extraction — one workflow, three passes, and a clear test for when each pass is done.
Five prompts that put an AI assistant to work on the method itself — including the SOP X-Ray, which shows you the holes in the documentation you already trust.