Dialogue — The Machine That Eats Itself
Bob's office. He looks troubled.
Bob: They let Janet go.
Alice: Janet who runs — ran — facilities?
Bob: Eleven years. She knew everything. The boiler cycles at 3 AM on Tuesdays because of a thermal expansion issue in the east wing pipes. There's a supplier code that changed in 2019 and if you use the old one the order bounces. The revolving door at reception — if the temperature drops below minus two, you check for warm water on the bottom rail or it seizes.
Alice: How much does she cost?
Bob: "Cost." £38,000 plus pension. Replaced by a national facilities contract. Cheaper on paper. None of them know about the boiler.
Alice: (to the Agent) We're trying to understand the real cost of replacing a long-serving facilities coordinator. She has eleven years of tacit knowledge specific to this building — equipment quirks, supplier relationships, failure patterns, undocumented workarounds. Her replacement is a national facilities contract. The spreadsheet says it's cheaper. What's the spreadsheet missing?
Agent: The spreadsheet is likely missing several categories of value that don't appear as line items:
Tacit operational knowledge — equipment-specific behaviour, failure patterns, undocumented fixes. Accumulated over eleven years. Not transferable through a handover document.
Preventive awareness — she likely prevents problems that never become visible because they never happen. These avoided costs appear in no budget.
Recovery time — when the first unforeseen problem occurs, the new provider will take significantly longer to diagnose and resolve it. The gap between "it's broken" and "I know what that is" may be months.
Relationship capital — supplier contacts, trust with building users, knowledge of informal processes.
Is there time to capture her knowledge before she leaves?
Bob: (staring at the screen) It asked me that. The old version would have given me a list of cost-benefit frameworks.
Alice: You gave it the context. It gave you a different answer.
Bob: Janet leaves Friday. The boiler will find out in February.
The knowledge walks out the door at five o'clock on a Friday. The spreadsheet gets cheaper. The building gets stupider.