Title: A Field Guide to the Coworkers Who Never Document Anything Author: Nikki Dulas Date: July 6, 2026 Category: Operations / Team Culture
Every workplace has them. You’ve probably worked with at least three. You might even be one, and that’s okay, we’re not here to judge.
They’re usually good employees, even great ones. They just have their own relationship with writing things down. Here’s how to spot them, and how a little documentation goes a long way.
The Vault
Habitat: Been here 11 years. Knows everything. Carries it all in their head.
The Vault holds the whole company’s institutional memory. How the old system talks to the new one, why that one client gets billed differently than everybody else, what that weird folder on the server is actually for. Ask them anything and they’ll answer instantly, correctly, no notes needed.
Ask them to write it down, though, and you’ll get “oh, it’s easier if I just show you.”
The opportunity: The Vault is sitting on a goldmine of knowledge. Getting even a fraction of it written down turns one person’s expertise into something the whole team can lean on.
The Improviser
Habitat: Could not tell you how they do the thing. They just do it.
The Improviser isn’t hiding anything on purpose. They’ve done the process so many times it’s turned into muscle memory. Ask them to walk you through it and they’ll kind of stare off for a second and say something like “I don’t know, I just feel it out.”
The opportunity: A little structure around the Improviser’s process, even a rough outline, gives their instincts something the rest of the team can follow too.
The “I’ll Get To It”-er
Habitat: Has “document the onboarding process” sitting on their to-do list since March.
This one means well. They even started a doc once. It’s got a title and one bullet point, and it’s still sitting there.
The opportunity: This person doesn’t need more willpower, they need documentation to be part of the workflow instead of an extra task competing for attention.
The Oral Historian
Habitat: Will happily explain how something works. Out loud. At length. Right now, if you’ve got a minute.
This person loves sharing what they know. They’ll walk you through the whole process, backstory included, complete with the time it all went sideways back in 2021. The only catch is that it lives in conversation, not on paper.
The opportunity: The Oral Historian is basically doing the hard part already, explaining things clearly. All that’s missing is writing it down once so it doesn’t have to be repeated from scratch every time.
The Ghost
Habitat: Already moved on to a new role. Held more of the business together than anyone realized.
The Ghost is a reminder of just how much value walks around inside people’s heads every day. Their expertise didn’t disappear because they left the company; it left with them because it was never captured anywhere else.
The opportunity: This is exactly why capturing knowledge early, while someone’s still around to share it, pays off. It turns a person’s expertise into a lasting asset for the business.
The Fix Isn’t a Personality Transplant
None of these people are the problem. They’re skilled, reliable folks doing good work. The opportunity is building documentation into how work gets done, so knowledge doesn’t have to live with just one person to be useful.
You don’t need to turn your Vault into a technical writer overnight. You just need a system where writing things down is part of finishing the work, not an extra task competing for attention.
It’s a big part of why we’ve built documentation into our own culture at Pantheon, not just for clients, but internally too. Every department has its own Playbook, so the “how do we actually do this” question has an answer that doesn’t depend on catching the right person on the right day.
And when we find a gap, we close it. It gets documented, it gets added to the Playbook, so the next person isn’t held up.
Every business eventually hits the same moment: someone’s out, and a question comes up that only ever lived in one person’s head. The businesses that sail through it are the ones who did the work ahead of time, so the moment never turns into a scramble.
If this made you think of a specific coworker, that’s a great place to start. A little documentation goes a long way, and it’s never too late to begin.