In Case of Emergency, Start Here
Last year, I created a file called “In Case of Emergency – Start Here.” It grew out of a question I’ve found myself pondering increasingly often: if someone else had to step into my role tomorrow, would they know what they needed to carry on?
I began thinking about what I knew that no one else necessarily did: Which attorney had prepared our trust documents. Which professionals we engaged. Where important records were stored. What accounts existed and how they all fit together. Not passwords or account numbers, but context. The kind of information that seems obvious when you’re the person managing it and much less so when someone else suddenly has to.
Recently, that project led me to tackle something I’d long been putting off: reorganizing a file cabinet filled with decades of records, family documents, and financial information. As I sorted, labeled, and created a more coherent system, I realized I was working on the same question I’d started answering with that emergency file: making our shared history accessible to someone other than me.
In a corporate setting, we’d call it key-person risk. We know the dangers of institutional knowledge that exists only in one person’s head. We know how disruptive it is when critical information walks out the door unexpectedly. That’s why organizations document processes, transfer knowledge, and plan for succession.
Yet many of us create exactly that risk in our personal lives.
Every family has institutional knowledge. Someone knows where the documents are. Someone knows which advisor to call. Someone knows why a particular decision was made. The question is whether that knowledge exists anywhere besides one person’s head. An organized file cabinet isn’t really the point. The point is making things easier for the people who will succeed us.
A younger friend expressed curiosity about what I was working on. After I explained it, she said it made her want to call her parents immediately.
That’s really the question. If something happened to you tomorrow, would your family know what to do and where things are? And if something happened to your parents, would you?
The best leaders I’ve known didn’t leave a mess for those who came after them. We owe our loved ones the same consideration.
