Building Capability
Tool: The Hidden IP Audit
Chapter 2 — What You Actually Have (And What You Don’t Know You Have)
Purpose
Before you decide what to build, you need to know what you already have. Most organisations carry far more intellectual property than they’ve ever named. It is in the heads of long-serving staff, in critical spreadsheets nobody fully understands, in informal workarounds that represent the organisation’s best thinking.
This tool helps you surface it.
The audit works best immediately after completing the Business Landscape Map. Your map shows you who does what. This audit asks what do they actually know that makes the business work and what is at risk if they’re not there.
Part 1: The Franchise Prototype Test
The most useful question for surfacing hidden IP is: if you had to hand this business to a competent new owner tomorrow, what would break?
Work through each of the following:
1. What knowledge currently lives only in people — not in systems?
Think about your longest-serving team members. What do they know that nobody else does? What would disappear if they left?
| Person / role | What they know that isn’t written down | Risk if they left |
|---|---|---|
2. What would break in the first week?
If the new owner had no access to any individual’s personal knowledge, memory, or relationships — what would stop working?
| What would break | Why it’s person-dependent | What it would take to systematise it |
|---|---|---|
3. What would they not be able to do at all?
Not just what would slow down — what would be impossible without two or three specific people?
Part 2: Where is IP Hiding?
Work through each category. For each one, list what you find.
In spreadsheets
Almost every organisation has at least one spreadsheet that is critical to operations and terrifying to maintain. List yours.
| Spreadsheet | What it does | Who built / understands it | What breaks if it’s gone |
|---|---|---|---|
In informal processes
The way work actually gets done often has little to do with official documentation. What are the real workflows — the adaptations, shortcuts, and informal agreements that evolved because the official process didn’t quite work?
| Informal process | What problem it was solving | Where it lives (person / document / habit) |
|---|---|---|
In decision patterns
Senior people make hundreds of small judgement calls each day. Most are never documented. What are the recurring decisions that rely on someone’s accumulated experience rather than a written rule?
| Decision type | Who currently makes it | What criteria they use (as best you can capture) |
|---|---|---|
Part 3: The Core Question
This is the most important question in the audit. Take time with it.
What do you know how to do that your competitors don’t?
Not what you do differently on paper. Not what’s on your website. What have you genuinely worked out — through years of doing this — that gives your clients better results?
Write it down. Even if it feels obvious. Especially if it feels obvious.
Your answer:
And the companion question:
What do you know that most of your own staff don’t?
The expertise that lives only at senior level — the judgement calls, the rules of thumb, the things that take years to develop and are rarely explained.
Your answer:
Part 4: Connecting to the Map
Go back to your Business Landscape Map. For each piece of hidden IP you’ve identified:
- Which role on the map holds it? If it belongs to one person rather than a role, that’s a concentration risk worth noting.
- Which process overlay does it appear in? If it’s present in a step that’s marked amber or red, it’s both a vulnerability and an opportunity.
- Is it currently captured anywhere? A system, a document, a training guide — or only in someone’s head?
The IP that sits inside amber and red steps on your process overlays, held by a single person, and uncaptured anywhere else: that’s where you start. That’s what’s both most at risk and most worth building around.
What This Tells You
The things you’ve written down here are the foundation. They’re what any capability build should be designed around.
A system that doesn’t encode or leverage any of this isn’t building capability — it’s adding tools. The difference matters enormously when you get to selecting your entry point in Chapter 5.
Want to go deeper?
The full version of this tool — the Hidden IP Audit Kit — includes a facilitated workshop format for extracting and mapping your organisation’s IP across all four hidden categories, a scoring framework for prioritising which knowledge to formalise first, a guide for translating IP audit findings into a capability-building brief, and a template for building an IP register that stays useful over time.Available in the members area at [website]