Established in the spirit of organizational improvement

We asked hundreds of organizations
how their work gets done.
Almost none of them knew.

The Adhockery Institute researches, documents, and gently studies the phenomenon of organizations that function entirely on institutional memory, individual heroism, and the unspoken assumption that someone named Karen knows how to do it.

"Oh, we all just kind of know."
— Every organization we have ever visited
Our Publication Our Mission

Our Mission

We believe processes should exist before the person who knows them leaves.

Over many years of working with organizations of every size and description — manufacturing companies, service firms, a regional distributor of specialty foods whose onboarding process was, and we quote, "just watch Karen for a week" — we observed something consistent.

The people doing the work had developed, through years of actually doing it, a complete and functional understanding of every step, every shortcut, every exception, and every workaround that had quietly become policy sometime around 2019.

They just hadn't written any of it down.

This is what we call adhockery. Not a management philosophy. Just the very human tendency to run a perfectly competent operation entirely inside the heads of the people who built it.

This works beautifully right up until someone gets promoted, goes on vacation, wins the lottery, or has a bad Tuesday.

The fix is not a new software platform. It is not a two-day offsite with a ropes course. It is not a consultant — though we appreciate the work.

The fix is writing it down.

73% of process knowledge exists only in someone's head*
1 person typically holds the keys to any undocumented process*
0 organizations have ever said "we have too much documentation"*

* Figures estimated by the Institute. We did not document our methodology.

Adhockery Impact Index

Those numbers above? We made them up.

We stand by the spirit of them. But we would like, for once, to have actual data. So we built a survey.

The Adhockery Impact Index is an annual research effort measuring how adhockery manifests across organizations — and what it costs in time, money, and the quiet exhaustion of being the only person in the building who knows how to do the thing.

Responses are anonymous. It takes about five minutes. And unlike certain other institutional statistics, the methodology will be documented.

Take the Survey → Your data will become the annual State of Adhockery report.

New from the Institute

Escaping Adhockery book cover

Escaping Adhockery

A Process Journal for Companies That Wing Everything

The Institute's first publication is a deceptively simple intervention: a guided workbook organized to capture the way you actually work.

We didn't put the answers inside it, because we don't have them. You do. You've had them the whole time.

Suitable for giving to a colleague as a gift, leaving anonymously on a manager's desk, or using completely sincerely. It works either way.

Available on Amazon →
ad hock·er·y (n.) — the practice of reacting to what happens rather than following a plan.
— Merriam-Webster

About the Institute

We have spent decades inside organizations of every size.

From five-person startups running on shared spreadsheets and good intentions, to billion dollar enterprises running on essentially the same thing.

In every one of them, we found the same thing: people who showed up every day carrying institutional knowledge that existed nowhere else. They were not failing their organizations. Their organizations had simply never given them a place to put it down.

The best organizations we have encountered didn't just document their processes — they created cultures where knowledge belongs to everyone, growth belongs to everyone, and no single person has to be the one who holds it all together.

We also noticed that the quality of the breakroom coffee is not directly proportional to organizational morale.

It is not, however, unrelated.

Contact the Institute

Get in touch.

Whether you're seeking a bulk order, inquiring about the Institute's research, or would like to report an egregious example of organizational adhockery, we are here.