The Grab Method
Work is not lost evenly. It is lost at the grabs.
A grab is a point in your business where work is picked up, waits, or changes hands. Every process has a handful. They are where the time goes, and they are where we place workers.
An invoice waiting to be chased. A file waiting to be assembled. A renewal waiting for someone to notice. Between the moments anyone is actually working on it, the work sits, and the sitting is what it costs. The method is built on that one observation, and it has three steps.
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01
Find the grabs
We map one process: where work is picked up, where it waits, where it changes hands, and what each wait costs. Measured from your own records, not recalled in a workshop.
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02
Read the card
We propose the hire on one page, the Role Card: what it knows, what it can do, how it behaves, what it may touch, how far it can go before it must ask, and what it needs from you.
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03
Manage the term
A fixed term under real management: the Monday Report, the approval queue you control, reviews at 30, 60 and 90 days, and an attested handover. You keep everything.
Find the grabs.
Most businesses have never seen their own waits. Not because they are hidden, but because they are normal: nobody volunteers that an invoice sits in an inbox for a week, because it always has.
So we do not ask you to describe your process. We measure it, from your own records, through the Process Diagnostic: one process, one week, and out of it a picture of where the work waits, for how long, and what that costs. Most owners are surprised by the picture. The surprise is the point.
Read the card.
The hire is proposed on one page: the Role Card. Six parts, all in the language of a job spec, because that is the language you can already assess, argue with and hold to account.
Knowledge
What it knows: your terms, your thresholds, your voice. From your vault, not a model's general recollection.
Skills
What it can do, written as tasks a manager would recognise.
Behaviours
How it conducts itself when the work is ambiguous.
Tools
What it is permitted to use, and nothing beyond that.
Authority
How far it can go before it must ask. A grade in the contract, enforced in code.
Co-factors
What it needs from you for the role to work at all. Stated up front, because a role that assumes them silently fails quietly.
Manage the term.
A hire without a manager is a tool with a job title. Every GRABS term runs under the same standing management: a Monday Report every week, an approval queue you control, escalation routes with named destinations, and formal reviews at 30, 60 and 90 days against a measured baseline.
At the end of the term you keep the vault, the playbooks, the trained process and the attestation record. Renewal is a choice, never a default.
What we publish, and what we keep.
The method above is public and stays that way. How a Role Card is composed, how the grabs are classified and how a role is built from them is our library, refined across engagements, and it is the reason a card takes days rather than a discovery project. We publish what you get and every control you hold. We keep how it is made.
Whatever the method finds, this is the floor
The least any client ever receives is a complete structuring of their company's knowledge, the vault, and a step change in their knowledge management.
Start where the method starts.
One process, one week, and you keep everything it produces whether or not you hire.