The story almost always starts the same way. A key person leaves, into retirement or to another employer. For a few weeks everything runs. Then something happens that only they could solve. What follows is not one mistake but a sequence of sensible decisions that together lead into a trap.
Day one after the departure
The desk is empty, the handover is done, the successor is settling in. Nobody misses anything, because day-to-day work carries on. What is missing does not show in day-to-day work. It shows with the first special case, and that can take weeks to arrive.
Week three: the first call
A machine behaves differently than usual, a customer insists on an agreement that is written down nowhere. Someone still has the private number. The call takes ten minutes, the problem is solved, everyone is relieved.
This is the moment the trap is set.
Nobody writes down what was said on the phone. Why would they, it worked.
Month two: the consulting contract
After the third call it becomes too much for the person, or management feels uncomfortable relying on favours. So there is a contract. A few days a month, billed by effort, at a rate well above the former salary; by how much is worked through in the article on succession planning.
This decision is not wrong. When a production line is down or a key customer threatens to leave, the fastest route to a fix is often the person who knows the fix, and every week spent looking for alternatives costs more than the fee. Calling the former colleague in that situation is responsible. The problem is not the contract. The problem is what it leaves out: a mandate to capture the knowledge along the way.
Month six: the second dependency
Half a year later something has shifted. The successor has learned to bring in the consultant on difficult cases rather than decide herself. That is rational, since he knows better and mistakes fall back on her. But it means she never solves the difficult cases herself, and so never learns how.
A dependency on one person inside the organisation has become a dependency on one person outside it. The engagements do not decrease. They increase, because the organisation has grown used to having someone to ask.
Month twelve: when the consultant leaves too
At some point this route ends as well. The consultant no longer wants to, falls ill, moves away, or simply takes the retirement he meant to start a year ago. The labour market offers little relief, and not only in Germany: there, around 1.3 million people retire each year while only 800,000 enter the workforce (IW Köln, 2026), and comparable curves apply across much of Western Europe. Specialists with the same niche knowledge are hard to find, if they exist at all.
Then the knowledge is lost a second time, and this time there is no phone number. A year of consulting fees has postponed the problem, not solved it.
The way out lies in a small change that was possible in month two. Every paid engagement gets a second result: alongside the solved problem, a record of how the expert recognised it and why he decided as he did. An AI-led interview straight after the engagement costs him around 30 minutes. With Omnora Intelligence Management this becomes verified knowledge that the successor can retrieve herself next time. Better still, capture starts before the departure, for example during phased retirement or in the weeks after a resignation.
If a contract like this is running in your organisation right now: do you know under what condition it is supposed to end?
