Turn Your Best Employee's Instincts Into a Playbook Anyone Can Run

The stuck moment. Your best HVAC tech closes 8 of every 10 replacement quotes. The rest of your techs close 3. You ask him what he does differently and he shrugs: "I just read the customer." He is one back injury or one competitor offer away from taking that skill out of your company, and right now you have no way to teach it.

The expertise is real. It is just invisible, even to him. Here is how to pull it out.

The recipe.

1. Pick three real wins. Ask your expert to walk you through three specific recent jobs, start to finish. Specific jobs only. Tacit knowledge hides inside general advice, so keep pulling him back to "what happened on the Hendersons' call."
2. Ask about decisions, not descriptions. At each moment in the story, ask three questions: What did you notice right there? What else could you have done? Why did you pick that? Record the conversation on your phone. Thirty minutes is plenty.
3. Feed the recording to AI. Transcribe it and run the prompt below. It pulls out the cues he watches for, the if-then rules he runs, and the rules he follows without knowing he follows them.
4. Test it on a fresh case. Hand the draft playbook back to your expert with a new scenario and ask: would someone following this checklist make the same call you would? Patch whatever breaks.
5. Train one person on it this week. The model proves itself when someone average moves their number.

The AI move. Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT:

You are an expert knowledge engineer who turns tacit expertise into teachable playbooks.

Context: I run a [business type]. My best [role] consistently gets [their result] while the rest of the team gets [typical result]. I interviewed them about how they do it. The transcript is below.

Task:
1. Extract the mental model. List every cue they notice, every decision point, and the if-then rule they follow at each one, including rules they clearly use but never state directly.
2. Flag the gaps. Give me the 5 sharpest follow-up questions to ask them to fill the holes in the model.
3. Build the playbook. Turn the model into a one-page checklist a new hire could run on their next [call/job/deal], ordered the way the work actually happens.

Format: three sections with those exact headers. Write each rule as "When you see X, do Y, because Z."

Constraints: use only what is in the transcript. Where you infer an unstated rule, mark it [INFERRED] so I can verify it with the expert before it goes in the playbook.

Transcript:
[paste transcript here]

What it's worth: Moving the rest of the team from 3 closes in 10 to 5, on 40 quotes a month at $9K a job, is roughly $860K a year that currently depends on one person's unteachable gut.