Turnover Knowledge Half-Life

Turnover Knowledge Half-Life is the rate at which undocumented operational knowledge loses its usable value after the person who held it leaves the agency. Unlike documentation decay, which is gradual and continuous, turnover half-life is a step function: a single departure can erase months of accumulated client context, process nuance, and relationship history in one day. The framework matters because agencies price retainers on delivery consistency, and a senior strategist or account lead walking out the door can reset onboarding timelines for every client they touched. The practical countermeasure is not more documentation volume but capture at the point of decision: recording why a deliverable was scoped a certain way, not just what was produced. Slite's approach of monitoring Slack, GitHub, and Linear to detect when documentation drifts from reality is one example of tooling that shortens the half-life window by flagging gaps before a departure exposes them.