The handoff is the real test.

Every business says it wants to delegate. The real test comes the first time someone tries. A task that has lived in one person’s hands for years turns out to have a hundred small unstated parts: the exception for the Reynolds account, the supplier you call second, the way an invoice gets worded when the job ran long. None of it was ever written down, because the person doing it never needed to read it.

So the handoff stalls. Explaining the task takes longer than doing it, and the work quietly comes back. The owner concludes, not unreasonably, that no one else can do it right. What is actually true is narrower: no one else can do it yet, because the task exists only as a habit, and habits do not transfer by being watched once.

An assembly treats the handoff as the design brief. If a thing cannot be handed off, that is precise information about where the knowledge is trapped and what would have to become visible for someone else to hold it. The point is to move the task out of one memory and into a place with steps, examples, and the exceptions named.

The measure is simple. Pick the task you most dread explaining. When a capable new person can do it well from what is written, without finding you first, the business has gained something it did not have before: that task as an asset it owns, rather than a favor one person performs.

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