Continuity management is a collaborative endeavor. So, once I had determined that I wanted to explore the idea, I rounded up a small group of colleagues to help. These were people whose opinions I trusted, who knew what they were doing, and who were cutting-edge enough to be intrigued by a big idea. I figured we'd get together, read those chapters on continuity management that I had seen earlier, and talk about how we could make it work at WedgeMark—if they believed in it the way I did. I knew some of them would catch the vision and others wouldn't. But I thought a majority would.

My first telephone call was to Andre, a buddy of mine who has the same job I do, but in a different unit. I told him that I wanted to talk to him about a new management concept I'd heard about that I thought might help us. He hung up on me. I called him back and told him I'd read about the management idea in four draft chapters of a future management book. He hung up on me again. So I called him a third time. I'm fairly persistent and I've known Andre—and his idiosyncrasies and distaste for management theories—for a long time.

Since we have caller ID at the office, he knew it was me. "Hey," Andre snapped into the phone, "if you're going to keep calling about a new management idea, then I'll have to put you on my appointments calendar for people with new management ideas. Let's see. How about Wednesday.... of next year?"

"I'm serious, Andre," I told him. "It's a good idea, not a fad. Three minutes. You have three minutes?"

"Two minutes," he offered, as he put me on the speakerphone. Then I heard him typing. "The background noise you hear is me answering e-mail. It better be good. My attention is already wandering....."

"Listen, Andre. Remember when Sue quit last year and nobody really knew what she did and everything was chaotic for a while?"^[1]

"Yeah?"

"And remember how she had organized the client golf tournament and made it a big success? And then how her replacement didn't know what she was doing, and this year the clients complained, and the chairman chewed your butt out? And everybody said, 'Where the hell is Sue? It was a great tournament when she was here.' Remember that?"

"Of course," Andre replied, and the typing slowed. "How could I forget? It was a nightmare."

"No, it wasn't a nightmare. It was your nightmare. Because nobody but Sue knew how to put that tournament together, and nobody but Sue knew how to make that tournament work, and nobody but Sue knew all that on your watch."

"Yeah....." He stopped typing and took me off the speaker phone. "Crandall was furious."

"Exactly. And then you finally tracked Sue down at her new job and asked her nicely to please come run the tournament next year as a consultant, and you would pay her the highest hourly consulting fee the company could—no, wait. Let's be honest—you got down on your knees and begged her to come back and run the tournament. I saw that. It was pathetic. Oh, yes, and now the good part....."

"I remember," he groaned.

"When she wouldn't come back as a consultant for the amount of money the company could offer, you agreed to pay her 40 percent more out of your own pocket if she would do it. Remember that?"

"Yeah. I remember—"

"And how, this time, you assigned her replacement to write down how Sue did it so you'd never be chewed out again. Well, when you arranged that talk, what you did was to ensure knowledge continuity between Sue and her successor. That's what I want to talk to you about. Ensuring that the next time one of our employees leaves, we have harvested their operational knowledge to pass to their successor to keep our own success rolling. The goal is knowledge continuity, and the process is called continuity management. It's about maintaining knowledge continuity between employee generations. How simple is that?"

"Hummm," he said.

"Something else," I continued. "Remember when your administrative assistant left six months ago and nobody but her knew—"

"I can do lunch," Andre interrupted, panic slipping into his voice. "I can do lunch today." He paused, then whispered into the telephone. "I just found out this morning that my top salesperson got a better offer. Can we meet at 11?"

The first thing that came out of the brainstorming meetings that developed out of that first lunch with Andre was the realization that virtually everyone we talked with understood that knowledge discontinuity was a problem. We had all experienced the chaos that ensued for a period of time after the departure of a good employee, and we realized how much valuable knowledge had been lost. Golf Tournament Sue was just one of many examples. So, we were in agreement right away that the problems were real. The only questions centered around whether a solution was possible, and, if so, how that solution would work.

The more we explored the solution, the more our conversations spread to others and then caught on. Soon, people were talking about our "stealth project"—which wasn't intended to be stealthy—and making inquiries about joining us. As turnover continued to ravage our knowledge base and disrupt productivity, people grew excited about the possibility of developing defensive measures. Our lunch twosome quickly expanded to a core group of seven, which we promptly dubbed the "KC Prime" as a play on knowledge continuity and Kansas City steaks, which Rob, our technowizard, favored above all food. My admiring colleagues promptly elected me Supreme Continuity Manager—United States. KC Prime met over lunch (without the steaks), at breaks, after work, and through e-mail.

As our thinking crystallized, we developed six "get-started" principles to guide us through the process of implementing continuity management in our unit at WedgeMark. To some extent, they were simply realizations that came to us as we talked through the implications of the process we were developing. The day we finalized the get-started principles was the day we knew we were onto something important and that we would ride it all the way to the end, wherever the end would take us. We expected it to be a happy ending, of course, but we didn't know for sure in the beginning amid all the uncertainty of trying to introduce a big new idea.

Here are the get-started principles, which we dubbed the "prime stakes" for anchoring a continuity management tent:

Prime Stake 1. Continuity management can be implemented at any organizational level, involving as many employees as necessary.

We realized that continuity management could be implemented at any—or all—levels of WedgeMark and that it could therefore be initiated by any manager at his or her own level or below (e.g. at the level of the team, department, business unit, division, subsidiary, or the whole organization). It could be a companywide endeavor involving many levels and many people within those levels, or it could be the individual initiative of a single manager involving a few levels and a few employees within those levels. The difference between a small-scale and a large-scale continuity management implementation is negligible conceptually, but it can be quite different in practice because of the variation in available resources and the number of job classifications and people involved.

Prime Stake 2. Any degree of continuity management is better than no continuity management, but the more knowledge continuity, the better.

Ideally, continuity management would include all of WedgeMark's knowledge workers. In the knowledge-based economy of the Information Age, any knowledge continuity between employee generations is better than no knowledge continuity. Consequently, any degree of continuity management implementation is better than none. As a general rule, the greater the number of employees participating in continuity management, the greater the likely return in increased productivity and profits. The truth of this principle was substantiated by our own experience, including the turnover among our peers and subordinates that had caused us problems. We could construct a highly sophisticated continuity management program or a very simple one, but either way, we would be better off than we were now, with virtually no knowledge continuity between employee generations.

In some cases and for some organizations, a program with less-than-full participation might be necessary because of various constraints, such as cost. Another approach would be to start simply, with small-scale programs that can be developed and tested prior to large-scale implementation. It is not necessary to think in grandiose terms to achieve reasonable and effective levels of knowledge continuity. But, of course, the usual economies of scale do apply, so the more comprehensive the implementation, the greater the effect it is likely to have.

Prime Stake 3. Continuity management should be customized to fit each job.

We understood that continuity management in a given unit (whether a team, department, division, or the whole organization) would have to be customized to meet the specific needs of that unit, its job classifications, and its employees. While we intended to develop a general template for implementing continuity management throughout WedgeMark, we realized that the template had to be sufficiently adaptable to harvest and transfer job-critical operational knowledge for any job classification at WedgeMark.

Prime Stake 4. The continuity management process should be easy to understand and to utilize.

While some people hoard knowledge because it is a source of power and status, many hoard it because they don't have the time or the means to share that knowledge with their successors. Their problem is not hoarding per se, but the lack of a knowledge-capture-and-transfer system that would enable them to share what they know with those who succeed them. Therefore, whatever continuity management structure we developed to harvest, preserve, and transfer operational knowledge from incumbents to successors would have to be easy to understand, easy to update, and easy to use. More than that, it would have to be inviting as well, offering significant advantages to incumbent employees (our next principle).

Prime Stake 5. Continuity management process should be rewarding to incumbent employees as well as to their successors.

We concluded that the process of identifying and harvesting critical operational knowledge for each job would have to contain significant benefits for incumbent employees as well as for their successors. Our analysis suggested three approaches, all of which we intended to utilize. The first was to build operating advantages into the system that would make it worthwhile for incumbents to utilize and update the continuity management system regularly. These advantages would be constructed around an analysis of their critical operational knowledge and how to maximize the potential of that knowledge in their jobs.

The second approach was to develop a set of rewards that would support continuity management implementation and usage. Extrinsic rewards based on compensation, performance appraisal, and promotions would tie continuity management to the WedgeMark reward systems. Intrinsic rewards based on greater personal satisfaction from more efficient knowledge usage, higher productivity, learning opportunities, sharing with peers, contributing to the organization, and leaving a knowledge legacy were equally important and would be explained and supported.

The third approach was to build a culture that would support continuity management. While we did not underestimate the difficulty of this undertaking, we could not deny its importance. A related change effort to support knowledge management was already underway at WedgeMark, so we expected to be able to merge the two.

Prime Stake 6. Continuity management can utilize varying degrees of technological complexity and sophistication.

The question of what role technology should play in continuity management was a big one for KC Prime to tackle. Continuity management, we realized, was not a technological solution involving managers, but a management solution involving technology. In other words, continuity management will work with technology that is complex or simple, sophisticated or unsophisticated. On the other hand, the choice of technology will make a big difference in the nature and amount of critical operational knowledge that can be harvested and transferred and the ease with which that harvesting and transfer will take place. The more that technology can carry the manual burden of knowledge capture, organization, storage, and retrieval, the better it will be for incumbent employees and their successors.

WedgeMark had already undertaken a major knowledge management initiative, so we had various systems in place that could be adapted to pilot continuity management or even to launch a full-scale implementation of continuity management itself.

With the sixth prime stake, KC Prime had concluded its first formal task. Roger, one of our members, volunteered to keep the official minutes of our meetings and to provide executives summaries of the key points. We leapt at Roger's offer to serve as recording secretary and gave him a round of applause, because the rest of us dreaded that task. To say that Roger was fastidious, precise, and detail obsessed is an understatement on the order of calling the Grand Canyon a crevice.

"These summaries," Roger warned with an intense look as he warmed to his new role, "are critical to our work. They'll keep us on track and provide a permanent record of our efforts."

"Summaries is a boring term," Andre complained. "How about something more creative?"

"Call them take-aways, then," Roger said with satisfaction. "That's a business term. Roger's take-aways," he grinned.

We groaned.

"Roger's take-aways," Andre repeated. "Sounds like a take-out restaurant."

"It's a list of highlights—take-away ideas that summarize our main points."

"We know what it is, Roger," Sarah interrupted.

"No," Andre continued, "it doesn't sound like a take-out restaurant. More like a take-out menu, now that I think about it. Reminds me of a deli on Third Avenue I used to go to when...."

"Highlights! They're highlights. They're like having crib notes—you know, a cheat sheet for implementing continuity management."

"For God's sake, Roger," Sarah growled. "We know what they are. Just give them to us!"

And he did:

As our exploration of continuity management expanded beyond the early adopters who quickly favored it, we encountered pockets of resistance that both intrigued and concerned us. So KC Prime organized several informal focus groups of employees who didn't like the idea. After extended discussions with these people, we concluded that their objections to continuity management could be divided into five categories. Some of the barriers they raised to continuity management were perceptual and others were actual, but we discovered that they could usually be ameliorated and, in some cases, eliminated with the proper counterargument.

We called this research project our trip to the Great Barrier Reefs, because our goal was to determine the primary barriers to acceptance that employees were likely to raise to a continuity management initiative. Otherwise, we were afraid that our continuity management journey would end suddenly when our continuity ship struck a barrier reef we hadn't bothered to chart. And sank. This shameless use of a nautical metaphor developed courtesy of Cap'n Carlos. Carlos is a sailing nut, a wild marketeer, and a man who thinks of business in terms of wind, tides, tack, and trim. From our focus groups and discussions, we discovered five potential barriers to continuity management that constituted the Great Barrier Reefs. We identified each by assigning it a phrase that we thought represented the heart of the objection.

Reef 1. Where's the problem?

The first barrier is the most elementary. It results from a failure to recognize the cost of accumulated knowledge loss from departing employees. While those who raise this barrier admit that knowledge loss is a problem, they don't see how costly that loss is, so they dismiss it as a major problem.

When we considered this barrier and how to respond to it, we realized that it developed from a lack of analysis. We decided that the barrier was best overcome by expressing the knowledge loss in terms that people could understand and that would have meaning for them. We began with corporate statistics relating to job turnover and anecdotal stories of knowledge continuity disasters, of which there were plenty at WedgeMark. Usually, the bears (our nickname for those who raise barriers to implementing continuity management, versus the lions who overcome them) can accept intellectually that WedgeMark has a knowledge continuity problem when we quote the number of people who departed last year (usually suddenly) and the projections for those who say they're planning to retire over the next five years. The bears can certainly identify the cost and the lost productivity in their own cases when an administrative assistant, a coworker, or a subordinate leaves. When they see how knowledge loss affects them personally, they can often generalize those costs to the whole organization, and the full picture comes into focus. Now they recognize the problem, and they are ready to move to the next barrier.

Reef 2. So what can you do?

Those who run aground on this reef accept the high price of knowledge loss, but they see it as an inevitable cost of doing business.

"There's no way to avoid it" is a typical lament.

"Everyone suffers from knowledge loss" is another.

"You have to live with it; it's part of high job turnover" is a third.

When we raised the issue of impending retirements (and we have many coming up at WedgeMark), the bears' response reflected the same pattern of futility and helplessness. Occasionally, this pattern was disguised in proactive terms. "Increase incentives and delay the inevitable as long as possible" is the standard fix they propose. Any other preventive remedy—like trying to harvest the knowledge of departing employees before their departure—is seen as too complicated, too difficult, or just too much work.

"Whoa," objected Cap'n Carlos. "What's the problem here? Are these people depressed, lazy, or just low scorers on the initiative scale?"

"None of the above," Sarah responded crisply. "They haven't thought through to a long-term solution."

After studying this reef, we found that the best response to these bears was the simplest: Some knowledge loss may be inevitable, but catastrophic knowledge loss is not. Some continuity management is better than no continuity management, a fact the bears can see for themselves in their own career-scarring knowledge-loss episodes. Even if continuity management is implemented at the most basic level, some critical operational knowledge will be preserved and transferred to successors. When these bears accept that continuity management can be implemented, at least theoretically, they are ready to sail toward the next set of rocks.

Reef 3. There's no more room on my plate.

This response is a knee-jerk reaction to a deep fear that runs through most of the employees at WedgeMark—and not just the bears. It's a fear of being assigned more work when they are already overworked. And they are overworked. Too many of us at WedgeMark, for example, have had to take on the work of fired employees—ghost work we call it, because it belongs to the departed and won't leave us. Even people without ghost work are burdened by extra assignments that are dropped on them as we turn "lean and mean" or (my own favorite) "trim and triggered." Which really means "beleaguered and burned out." The fear among employees of "one more thing to do" that will result in extra work and no extra reward has reached clinical proportions. But the fear is legitimate and deserves to be addressed.

We proposed to answer the bears in this way: After analyzing continuity management, we concluded that it doesn't have to entail extra work because it will replace other, less important, non–knowledge enhancing work and so will create no net addition to the workload.

"Not a chance!" objected Cap'n Carlos. "Every management guru, consultant, and wacko who ever came, strolled, or sailed down the pike makes that claim, usually in an authoritative voice and a custom-made suit."

"Cynical?" Rob ventured.

"Nobody believes the 'no net addition to work' claim anymore," Carlos maintained. "That only happens at Disneyland when you visit Magic Management. And we've all been to Magic Management—with Mickey Mouse."

"I'm afraid the claim is true," Andre said matter-of-factly.

"It hasn't been true for the last 13 management fads, which would take us back about, oh, say five years."

"I can't be responsible for past idiocies embraced by the gullible," Andre offered smoothly. "I can be responsible for something highly innovative, very original, and hugely important—continuity management.

"Then you'll have to prove it," Carlos persisted. "Whenever a new management initiative, pet program, or infomercial idea is proposed, trotted out, or rammed down the throats of employees still hoarse from the last one, this claim is made."

"It's easy to prove to those with functioning minds," Rob said. "It's completely logical and totally demonstrable."

"Despite your comments, I admire your confidence," Carlos said. "So where's the proof?"

This conversation led to much discussion. Here is what we concluded: Continuity management does eliminate certain tasks because it eliminates to-do items that are irrelevant or tangential to the productive heart of the work that's being done. This task elimination results from the knowledge analysis built into continuity management that identifies critical operational knowledge and its most effective utilization. At the same time, the same knowledge analysis increases productivity and so makes more time available for continuity management tasks. Finally, the analysis itself structures operational knowledge and organizes knowledge sources, making both more accessible and applicable for quick decision making.

The "no more room on my plate" barrier appears when continuity management is perceived as an add-on function rather than as an essential aspect of managing, a productivity generator, and a contributor to individual competence and advancement. At its fullest, continuity management is a means of calling into relief—and shaping—the essential elements of the operational knowledge that each of us works with every day, creating a new perspective on knowledge that increases leveraged productivity. Continuity management enriches the plate and leaves more room, rather than impoverishing it and leaving less.

Reef 4. Not enough resources.

We admired the combination of complexity and simplicity in this negative bear response. "Of course, why didn't I think of that!" the innocent are tempted to respond. Yet it sounds good only because it's a corporate truism. There are never enough resources for anything at WedgeMark, but that's irrelevant. This reef is born of a mental cramp trigged by something new the bear hasn't thought about. It appears in the Bears Handbook as Automatic Objection 4, and it can always be relied on to temporarily derail a great idea. Like all clichés, it contains an element of truth. In fact, genuine concern over the resource commitments required for continuity management is legitimate and can make a valuable contribution to any discussion about its implementation. The resources involved include the usual list of suspects: people, time, and technology.

The response that we developed to this bear claim reflects the KC Primers' earnest efforts to wrestle with the issue and resolve it. The answer is this: The amount of time and resources required for continuity management can be limited by the design of the continuity management implementation. Four factors determine the size of the committed organizational resources: continuity management's depth, breadth, technological sophistication, and organizational support (each of which is covered in more detail later). Because continuity management can be implemented at any level, it can be implemented within the cost constraints imposed on it. When launched as a pilot or incrementally, the results of continuity management can be measured as its implementation proceeds, and its value can be gauged in comparison to its drawdown of resources. For the grizzliest bears, the pilot program can often provide the proof they need to get beyond this barrier—and on to the next one.

Reef 5. It's not my problem, or what's in it for me?

This reef came from a very candid bear who got right to the point and to the bottom line as he perceived it. In fact, the issue he raised is a good one and slightly difficult to handle, because the claim can be intuitively attractive. It also has an element of truth if the employee's career goals with the company are short-term. For short-term employees, continuity management is a sacrifice they're being asked to make for the sake of the company and the future—a sacrifice that will not benefit them personally, now or ever. Another version of that idea is "Why should I care about my successor?" Their thinking goes something like, "Continuity management is for future employees and has little or nothing to do with me." Still another version is: "What's in it for me? The answer to these bears will be explored in more detail as the implementation process unfolds, but, in a general way, the benefits of continuity management even to these bears are:

And now, here are Roger's take-aways on the Great Barrier Reefs:

The story that unfolds in the coming pages will describe how we planned and implemented continuity management at WedgeMark. I have provided significant detail about the thinking that went into developing continuity management so that you can clearly understand its rationale and its components. Your own implementation will be much less complicated than ours, because you will not have to engage in all these activities, and you can build on the models that we have developed. Each implementation of continuity management will be different, depending on such factors as organizational size, resources, culture, industry segment, and so forth. What we hope—speaking for KC Prime—is that you will learn from what we did right and what we did wrong and glean valuable insights should you want to implement continuity management in your organization.

While the principles and concepts described in this journal relate to WedgeMark, they are fully applicable to smaller-scale implementations, whether in a smaller company or in a business unit of a large company. Either implementation would follow the same principles that characterize the implementation that we describe.

Continuity management remains a work in progress. We do know this, however: The more we have explored continuity management, the more we have discovered its potential to increase productivity, enrich careers, and position companies to achieve industry dominance. Continuity management has surpassed all the expectations that Andre and I had the first time we met to talk about stemming the knowledge loss that was depleting our ability to meet the demands of the marketplace and the threats of our competitors. We believe that it holds the same promise for you.