26 Mar
A few weeks ago, I was on a call with a construction management firm preparing to double in size over the next few years. They wanted our help documenting their processes so they could scale without the chaos.
But here’s what the leadership team said that stopped me: “We don’t want a bunch of Double O D documents.”
I asked what they meant.
“One Of Documents. Processes that only happen once. The ‘this only happens when’ situations. The thing that happened one time five years ago that someone decided to write down just in case. We’ve seen what happens when you fill a drive with those. No one can find anything. No one knows how to do anything. It’s not scalable.”
I loved this so much I had to steal it.
The Double O D Document is silently suffocating organizations everywhere.
Here’s how it happens. Someone has a unique situation. They figure out how to handle it. And then, with the best of intentions, they document it. Because what if it happens again? What if someone else needs to know?
Multiply that by every edge case, every exception, every one-time scenario across every department for years. And suddenly you have 200 documents. Maybe more.
No one can find anything. No one knows what’s current. No one trusts the documentation because half of it is irrelevant and the other half is outdated. So people stop looking. They ask Steve. They figure it out themselves. They reinvent the wheel.
The documentation was supposed to create clarity. Instead, it created noise.
This is the trap: documenting everything feels productive. But documentation without discipline is just clutter.
The instinct makes sense. You want to capture knowledge. You want to be thorough. You don’t want anything to fall through the cracks. But when you document every edge case, you bury the core. The stuff people actually need to do their jobs gets lost in a sea of “just in case.”
And who’s going to maintain all of that? Who’s going to keep 200 documents current as processes evolve? No one. So the documentation decays. And decayed documentation is worse than no documentation, because it looks like an answer, but leads you astray.
The fix isn’t to document more. It’s to document less, but better.
You document the 20% that shows people how to do 80% of the work. The core processes. The repeatable work. The things that happen daily, weekly, monthly; not the thing that happened once in 2019.
That means being ruthless about what earns a document. Before you write anything, ask: Does this happen regularly? Will someone need this again? Is this core to how we operate, or is it an exception we handled once?
If it’s a One Of, let it go. Handle it when it comes up. Don’t let it clutter the system.
The goal isn’t comprehensive documentation. It’s usable documentation.
A handful of clear, current, findable documents that people actually use beats 200 files no one trusts.
The company with 200 Double O D documents? No one could find anything. No one knew how to do anything. The documentation had become the problem it was supposed to solve.
The construction firm that coined the term? They’re building something different. Lean. Focused. Scalable.
How many One Of Documents are hiding in your systems right now? That might be the first thing to fix.