Turnover Knowledge Half-Life

Turnover Knowledge Half-Life is the window during which a departing employee's undocumented context is still recoverable by the agency that holds it. Every resignation starts a clock: client preferences, escalation history, and delivery quirks stay usable only while someone who worked alongside that person can still be asked. Once the clock runs out, the retainer absorbs the cost as rework, longer onboarding, and inconsistent client delivery. The framework matters because agencies rarely price this decay into staffing decisions. A practical example: when a delivery lead leaves, the first 30 days are the cheapest window to extract their context into a shared knowledge base. Platforms that monitor connected tools for drift, such as Slite watching Slack, GitHub, and Linear, or Tettra answering repetitive questions inside Slack channels, shorten the extraction window by surfacing what is missing before the person is gone. GitBook's stale-content agent plays a similar role for technical documentation. The half-life is shorter than most agencies assume.