Make tacit knowledge reviewable

The service manager at a residential HVAC company has a senior technician retiring in four months. Twenty years of judgment about which furnace faults are worth a second visit lives in his head. The manager wants that judgment written down in a form other technicians can review and argue with, not a recording that sits in a folder.

The draft separates routine steps, exceptions and reasons behind decisions, with questions for unresolved points.

• The manager records a structured interview with the technician, using prompts Elvina drafted from the Service Call Standard in Company Knowledge, and uploads the recording with his written permission.
• Elvina transcribes the interview and, in Creation Studio, sorts what was said into routine steps, exceptions and the reasoning behind each judgment call.
• Where the technician contradicted a documented procedure or left a point unresolved, Elvina writes a question instead of filling the gap.
• The technician reads the synthesis in the Web workspace, corrects it, and the service manager approves it as a draft source for a future lesson.

A fictional contractor, Summit Comfort Heating & Air, employs 19 field technicians. The retiring technician handles the hardest no-heat calls. Two 45-minute interviews cover ignition faults and when to recommend replacement over repair. The company's Service Call Standard v6 is the reference document.

• A draft with 14 routine steps, nine exceptions and a 'why' note for each exception, such as why a flame-sensor reading below a stated value means a callback within a week.
• Six open questions, including one where the technician's rule of thumb conflicts with the standard's replacement threshold.
• The technician corrected two steps and confirmed the rest; the service manager sent the conflict to the owner of the standard.

Ask the expert to verify the synthesis. A fluent interview summary is not an approved operating standard.

• Written permission to use the recording is stored with the source.
• Routine steps, exceptions and reasons are separated, not blended into one narrative.
• Every unresolved point appears as a question with the expert's name on it.
• The expert has confirmed the synthesis before it is used in any lesson.

A fluent summary of an interview is not an approved operating standard. Elvina organizes what the expert said; it does not verify it against physics or code, and it will not promote the draft to an approved source without the manager and the expert signing off. Contradictions with existing procedures are escalated to the document owner.