Key-man risk: the system only one person understands
How to find out what your business depends on before the person leaves.
Ask an executive what would hurt most next quarter and the honest answer is often a name. One person built the process, still runs it, and is the only one who understands why it works. Nothing is documented, because it was never meant to last this long.
It happens by accident
A deadline arrived, someone capable solved it in a spreadsheet, and the fix worked well enough to become the process. Three years later the file has forty tabs, the logic lives in one head, and the audit asks who reviews it.
The person is not the risk
The uncomfortable part is that the person is usually not the risk. They are the one holding it together, often without recognition and without leave. The risk is that the business made a single point of failure out of a favour.
How to find it before it finds you
Run the thought experiment honestly. If this person did not come back from leave on Monday, which processes stop? Write those down. For each one, ask whether anyone else could run it from what is written — not from what they could work out. The gap between those two answers is your key-man risk, measured.
The fix is not heroics. It is getting the knowledge out of one head, rebuilding the process in the open, and handing it over properly. We do that work, but even naming it is most of the value.