Tragedy of the commons applied to organisations: when several people share responsibility for a process, it often gets done badly or not at all — while everyone reasonably believes someone else has it. An AOR list groups every function in the organisation into categories and assigns each category to **one, and only one, person.** It doubles as a company directory and a routing layer. ### **What I'm thinking about** 1. **Build it live, in 45 minutes, never asynchronously** – The reason is specific: "many people will 'not know what to do' and will get frustrated if they have to do this offline, without the ability to ask questions in real-time. They don't want to do it wrong… Many will choose not to do it all rather than risk getting it wrong." 2. **Three fifteen-minute blocks** – Everyone writes their own areas. Everyone reads each other's and flags conflicts — anything resolvable in under two minutes gets resolved on the spot, everything else becomes a written issue. Then each person picks one function and documents its process, linked next to the entry. 3. **Go in with your own already written** – Plus one process documented, as the worked example. Demonstrating beats instructing. 4. **The conflicts are the point** – Two names against one function is a live ambiguity that has been silently costing you. One function with no name is a gap nobody has noticed. Both are invisible until the list exists. 5. **It cascades and it documents itself** – Each person runs the same exercise with their own team, and everyone writes one process per week. The claim is that this documents every process in the organisation within about three months, and the write-ups become the onboarding curriculum. ### **So what?** This is highest-yield wherever several workstreams share the same people, which is the exact condition under which work routes by habit rather than by design — and habit routes to whoever is best at it, which is how the [[The Zone of Excellence Is the Danger Zone|Zone of Excellence]] trap gets built. The companion discipline is eliminating single points of failure: a function only one person knows how to perform. Two remedies — write the process down the second time you do anything, and cross-train a named backup for every entry on the list. Related: [[Directly Responsible Individual]] [[The Zone of Excellence Is the Danger Zone]] [[The Energy Audit]] [[Operating Principles]] [[Executive Operating System MOC]]