August is a quiet month in many companies. People take holidays, meetings thin out, and the pace slows.
It is also the best audit most companies never plan.
When a key person goes away for two weeks, you find out very quickly where the organisation depends on them. The deployment that only one engineer knows how to run. The customer who only trusts one account manager. The approval that waits because only one person has the access. The question nobody else can answer.
I call this the holiday test. Every company takes it each summer. Few write down the results.
What the Test Reveals
The failures are usually small and practical. That is what makes them easy to ignore.
Knowledge in one head A system, a process, or a customer relationship that only one person understands. When they are away, work stops or slows, or someone guesses.
Access in one account Passwords, admin rights, payment approvals, or vendor accounts tied to a single person. Sometimes this is a security choice. Often it is an accident of history.
Decisions in one inbox Questions that only one person is allowed to answer. The team waits, or works around the gap and hopes it was the right call.
Rituals that depend on one person The weekly release, the monthly report, the on-call handover. They happen because one person makes them happen. Without them, they quietly do not.
None of these is a crisis on its own. Together, they describe how fragile the organisation really is.
Why It Matters Beyond Summer
A holiday is a planned, temporary absence. You know it is coming. You know when the person will be back.
Real life is less polite. People get sick. They change jobs. They go on long leave. In some places, people are called away at short notice for weeks at a time. If the company cannot cope with a planned two-week absence, it is not ready for an unplanned one.
There is a growth angle too. A company where key knowledge sits with a few people cannot scale easily. Every new team, new product, or new market needs those same people. They become the bottleneck, and often the most tired people in the building.
Run the Test on Purpose
Instead of discovering the results by accident, run the test deliberately.
- Keep a simple log. During the holiday season, ask team leads to note every time work waited for someone who was away. What was needed, who had it, how long the wait was. A shared document is enough.
- List the single points. In September, review the log. Group the entries: knowledge, access, decisions, rituals. You will see the same few names and the same few systems again and again.
- Pick the top five. Do not try to fix everything. Choose the five dependencies that caused the most delay or the most risk.
- Fix each one properly. For knowledge, write it down and have a second person do the task while the first watches. For access, add a second trusted person with clear rules. For decisions, define what others can decide without asking. For rituals, write the steps and rotate who runs them.
- Test again. Before the next long holiday, ask the person who owned the dependency to step away for a day. See whether the work continues.
Protect the People, Too
This is not only about the company. The people who hold everything together are often the ones who cannot really switch off. They check messages on the beach because they know nobody else can answer.
Spreading knowledge and authority is a gift to them as much as to the organisation. A holiday should be a holiday.
The Results Are Already In
If your company had a quiet August, the results of this year's holiday test are already sitting in your team's memory. The waits, the workarounds, the questions nobody could answer.
Collect them now, while they are fresh. Fix the top few before the busy season starts. Next summer, take the test again, and see how much less breaks.
