Appendix:
Continuity
Books - Tools for
passing knowledge onward
by
Gwyneth
In my work as a technical
expert, I have often been asked to accept new assignments, offices or
posts which I have not previously filled, for which I have had little
in the
way of preparatory time. Sometimes the task at hand has never been done
before,
and then I am on my own to sort out how best to organise the people and
material resources which have been granted to me by the powers that be.
More often, though, I find myself stepping into an office
or post from which someone else has just been, or is just about to be,
rotated
out to a new assignment. If we are both lucky, there will be some
overlap time
between us, and we can sit down and work through all the things I need
to know,
and all the procedures that have been established by the people who
were there
before me. That's a grand and comforting thing indeed.
But I don’t always have the luxury of crossover time.
Sometimes I sit down at my new desk and find a pile of papers and
telephone
message slips, all of which need my urgent care and attention. I face
three
nasty questions:
What should I do
first?
Where are the things I need to
do this?
And who can help
me do it?
Over the past twenty years or so, I have more and more
often found a 'Continuity Book' sitting on top of that proverbial desk,
waiting
for me to read its pages and learn what I should be doing. It will be a
different book in every different office, at every different desk. What
these
books all have in common is that they will have been written by someone
who did
that very job before me, who had to puzzle out the answers to those
three nasty
questions.
If you go off and do a search of the Web, you will find
very little mention of Continuity Books; I suppose that this is mostly
because
they are unique to each office, and there are no 'one version fits all'
Continuity Books. Indeed, unless you are sharing a role or
responsibility with
several other people, any Continuity Book which you read (or you
yourself
write) will be written by a single person and intended for a readership
consisting of a single person. There's a fairly good chance, in fact,
that the
author of one of these books will never cross paths with its eventual
readers
-- that in itself should be a sobering thought.
So, above all, write clearly. Don’t hint at things, be
coy about them, or talk around them. Use plain and simple words, verbs
of
action, the basic language that would be shared by two friends who
trusted one
another.
A Continuity Book doesn't need to be a big, long,
exhaustive document. It should, however, be easily rearranged, and be
amenable
to expansion or contraction as the needs and duties of its readers
change. A
loose-leaf binder makes a perfect starting point. Toss in a few tabbed
pages so
that the reader can find his or her way around, and you are off to the
races.
Sometimes a person has more than one set of duties and
responsibilities. In that case, there should be more than one
Continuity Book,
and each one should be clearly labelled with the office to which it
refers. In
the industrial world, maybe the books are labelled "Lathe Operator"
and "Blacksmith". In the military world, they might say "Public
Affairs Officer" and "Environment, Health and Safety Officer."
In a coven the books might be "Maiden" and "Summoner." What
all of these books have in common is that they contain relevant
information
that will help the reader perform the tasks to which they refer. That
information might include telephone numbers, equipment servicing
instructions,
lists of spare parts, or something as basic as a description of what
papers are
kept in which desk drawer.
Why wait for
Spring? Do it now!
When I was younger, the
Canadian government sponsored a Winter Works programme, whose core
objective
was to exhort people to commission tradespeople and construction
workers to
build and repair things during the winter months, which were usually
quite slow
periods in the construction industry. So, several times a day, the
radio would
play a catchy little jingle that ended with the catch-hrase, "Why wait
for
Spring? Do it now!"
And so you should, when it comes to putting together a
Continuity Book. If one does not exist for the role which you fill
within your
group, start one when you first accept that role. If a book already
does (lucky
you!), then keep it actively updated; add new things as they are
needful, and
correct the information that was already there. Don’t wait for Spring
-- don't
wait until your last week in that role, and find yourself hurriedly
trying to
bring a Continuity Book up to date for your successor.
Besides avoiding a time crunch, the very actions of
compiling or updating a Continuity Book will help you better understand
the
role which you have been given to perform. Working with the book may
guide you
to the insights that will lead to improved ways of doing things, or
significant
new shortcuts around long-established blockages.
Use the darned
thing
Put your Continuity Book
together (or re-arrange it -- that's why the loose-leaf binder is
there!) in
such a way that the book can actually be useful. The best test of
usability is
whether you yourself will use it. That might mean that the book should
be small
and portable -- perhaps a small loose-leaf book, of the sort that
business
people used to use before small computers became fashionable. I still
use my
trusty Filofax books -- little leather binders with re-arrangeable
diary pages,
and lots of useful information that she herself wrote, or copied from
other
sources. Maybe you won't want a set of trigonometric tables, but maybe
a
calendar of moon phases for the next two years might be handy. Perhaps,
if you
are arranging outdoor rituals, a chart of the likelihood of rain or
snow in any
season of the year would be useful. Witches might want to have recipes
for
cookies, or incenses, or the like.
You will know that you have succeeded, when you start
using the Continuity Book for refreshing your memory on a daily basis.
Furthermore, the book that you have made, revised and used yourself is
a book
which is more likely to be useful to your successor. That was the goal
in the
very beginning, right?
Critical data
At a minimum, the Continuity
Book should contain critical reference data that could not be easily
found
anywhere else. Such data might comprise: mailing lists, or telephone
call-out
lists; savings account numbers, the addresses of the credit unions or
banks
themselves. Don’t forget deposit slips. If you are passing along large
paper
files, an index or table of contents to the files would be helpful to
your
successor. I once 'inherited' 16 rolls of microfilm and a viewing
machine, with
no index as to what was on the microfilm. After much bother, when I
left that
particular assignment there was an index to pass along to my
successor.
Equipment lists
What equipment do you need
to do your work? Where is it kept? Who fixes or maintains it? What
pieces or
parts are interchangeable (and which ones, catastrophically, aren't?).
As a
practical example: where in your kitchen do you keep all the things
that you
need to bake bread?
If you have any specialized equipment, as, for
example, a group that runs a festival might have a button-making
machine, you'll want to include instructions for how to operate and
maintain it, as well as information about where to get supplies.
Keep track of the maintenance status of key pieces of
equipment. If there is a long lead time for ordering and receiving
supplies,
make sure that your successor is aware of it.
Lists of other
resources
Particularly in the case of
complicated assignments, there may be no easy way to cram all the
information
into one book. Consider making a reference list, that points to the ten
or so
books which you found so frequently handy. Perhaps there are lists of
useful
websites that are worth passing along to your successor -- be sure to
date such
references, since in that way you give your successor a fair chance of
being
able to find websites by means of Web archives.
Job descriptions
Write down, on one page if
you can, a description of what you do, and how much of your time you
spend
doing it. That will be a helpful reminder to your successor, especially
if
there are time-management issues.
For complex jobs, consider lists of essential tasks, or
flow charts showing how tasks relate to each other. Don’t forget to
make notes
of who the people are with whom you regularly must talk, or work
together with.
Make sure that you have provided contact information for them.
If paperwork is part of your assignment, keep some
examples of completed forms. Keep some blank forms, too, in case they
are hard
to get (or the agency in question cannot or will not supply them any
more).
Write down vendor lists, and keep notes about prices. If
you have to pay the rent for a rehearsal space, who do you pay it to,
in what
form, and how much is the rent? Unscrupulous people have been known to
take
advantage of transitions between office-holders to change the terms of
rentals,
or their amount, to their own advantage.
Calendars and
timetables
If you must perform the same
actions each year (for example, putting on a gathering), then
there
will be certain times and seasons by which, or during which, certain
things
must be done. Write those times and seasons down in terms of a
timetable,
perhaps as so many weeks before the event will happen. Enclose, if you
can, a
set of calendars for the five years ahead of your year. This will make
it
easier for you, and your successor, to conduct longer-range planning.
Keep an archive
A gathering's Continuity Book
contains copies of previous years' programme guidebooks,
membership-button
artwork, and other historic items such as menus for the meal plan of a
gathering, or
notes on
what did and didn’t go well. If you can leave your own set of memories
for your
successors, they may find them helpful and inspiring.
Lessons learned
Keep track of what you have
learned about your office -- that includes successes as well as
failures. If
there was a problem, how did you solve it? That's particularly
important when
it comes to recalcitrant things such as computers, or insurance
agencies.
Make it easy to
update
Although your goal is to
write down all the useful references for your own ongoing use (and your
successor's use, too), you will surely find that some of the
information needs
to be updated from time to time.
Although you can make these revisions in handwriting or
with a typewriter (both being ways that I keep my Filofax book up to
date), you
may well find it easier to keep a master copy of the Continuity Book as
a
computer file, and thus do the updates with a word-processing
programme. So
long as you have kept each key item of information on a separate page,
then it
becomes easy to update the Continuity Book by revising and printing out
just
that page.
If you are going to use a computer in this way, be sure
to save the data in a form that it can be read, and worked with, by the
computer that your successor is likely to be using. Don't forget the
problem of
incompatible software versions -- maybe your successor will be using
older
software on a smaller, less-capable computer. Various Pagan
organizations have, over
the years, had no end of trouble caused by incompatible computer
programmes and
storage media. How many of us can still read Appleworks
data off a 5¼-inch floppy-disk?
Table of contents
Although the table of
contents should be the first page in the Continuity Book, it will be
one of the
last pages that you write, since it has to point to where everything is
in the
book. If you try to assemble the table of contents by hand, you can
save a lot
of mindless bother by 'chunking it' out. Perhaps it will look like this:
Table
of Contents
Emergencies………………..Red
Tab
Rites
of Passage……………Orange Tab
People………………………Pink
Tab
Recipes……………………..Yellow
Tab
Finances…………………….Green
Tab
Elder
Matters……………….Purple Tab
Agencies
and Resources……Blue Tab
Last
updated by Felicitas Ravensnout on July 5th, 1990
If you are using a
word-processing programme to compile (and then subsequently print out)
your book,
then it is much easier to make a detailed index, complete with page
numbers if
that is what you want.
Ongoing actions
Towards the end of your term
of office, make notes of the actions that are ongoing, all the projects
which
you have started but which your successor will be finishing. I have
found this
section of established Continuity Books to be the most fascinating of
all.
Consider adding your own notes about how you dealt with the challenges
and
opportunities which your predecessor left for you to inherit.
Bear in mind that there is no standard format or set
template for a Continuity Book. If you make and maintain it in a way
which is
useful to you, and then you pass it onwards, you will have given a
great gift
to your successor.
Let’s get started!
------------------------------------------------------
go back to:
|