Protocol P-00: The 20-question drill

In-house · Issue #1 · One protocol a week for People, HR, and Ops leads who want their company's knowledge ready for AI they control.

Hi there,

Before any company buys hardware or software to answer questions from its own documents, there's a cheaper question to answer first: can your documents answer the questions people actually ask?

Most teams have never measured it. So this first protocol is a drill. It costs nothing, takes about half a day, and gives you a number you can re-check every quarter.

Why start here

People are already asking AI tools about work. In Microsoft and LinkedIn's 2024 Work Trend Index, 78% of AI users said they bring their own AI tools to work (source). In Cisco's 2024 Data Privacy Benchmark Study, 45% of respondents said they had entered employee names or information into generative AI tools (source).

Giving people a good in-house answer is the better move. But an assistant built on your documents can only be as good as those documents. If the handbook is two versions behind and the real process lives in someone's head, the assistant will repeat your gaps back to you, confidently. Check the paperwork before you blame the AI.

The protocol

Indications. You're thinking about AI for internal questions, or you've never measured how much of what people ask is written down.

Contraindications. Don't put real names or personal details in the question list. This isn't a test of anyone on your team.

Equipment. Twenty real questions from last quarter, your current handbook, policies and SOPs, a timer, and a spreadsheet.

Procedure.

1. Collect 20 real questions people asked People Ops or Ops last quarter. Pull them from the inbox, chat, and new-hire check-ins. Strip out names.
2. Pick someone who didn't write the documents. A recent hire is ideal.
3. For each question, they look for the answer in the documents alone. No asking anyone.
4. Record whether it was found, how many minutes it took, which document had it, and whether the answer was current.
5. Sort every miss into three piles: not written down, written but hard to find, and written but out of date.
6. Pick the three biggest misses and give each one an owner and a date.

Checks. You have a found-rate, say 11 of 20, that you can measure again next quarter. Every miss is in a pile, and three fixes have owners.

Handoff. The People Ops lead keeps the question list and runs the drill again each quarter.

What the three piles tell you

• Not written down is tribal knowledge. See P-04, Capture tribal knowledge once: record the expert explaining it, transcribe it on your own machine, and turn it into steps.
• Hard to find is a sources problem. See P-01, Establish one source of truth.
• Out of date is an ownership problem. See P-02, Assign owners and review dates.

Notice that none of the fixes involve buying anything. That's normal. The drill usually shows that the first moves are about paperwork, not technology.

Why a drill

I spent 16 years as a paramedic. You don't find out whether a crew is ready during the real call. You run the drill, find what's missing from the bag, fix it, and run it again. Company knowledge works the same way.

Want the bigger picture?

The Knowledge Readiness Check takes about ten minutes. It scores six areas, including sources, ownership, access, and tribal knowledge, and gives you a short plan built from these protocols. It runs entirely in your browser, and your answers aren't sent anywhere.

Next week: P-03, Map who sees what. Before any assistant answers from your documents, you need to know who's allowed to see each one.

If this was useful, forward it to whoever answers the handbook questions at your company.

Mike Folk

---

Disclosure: In-house is published by FolkTech AI, which builds local AI. Nothing in this issue is for sale, and every protocol here works without any FolkTech product.

You're getting this because you signed up at [placeholder domain]. Unsubscribe link goes here. Postal address goes here.