Our managers complain that documenting our Core Processes takes too much time, so our standard operating procedures remain trapped in their heads. How can we use voice memos and video transcripts with AI to document our 20/80 processes rapidly without pulling them away from their daily work?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The biggest barrier to documenting Core Processes in EOS is perfectionism. Managers believe documenting a process means sitting in a quiet room for twenty hours writing an eighty-page manual that nobody will ever read. As a result, the knowledge remains locked in their heads, keeping the company expert-dependent and depressing enterprise value.

The EOS 20/80 Rule states that you should document the twenty percent of the steps that produce eighty percent of the results. AI makes this fast and painless:
- Have the manager narrate the workflow while performing it. Use a screen recorder for computer tasks or a voice memo app on their phone for physical operations. Tell them to explain what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what common mistakes they watch out for.
- Export the raw audio transcript into a large language model.
- Feed the transcript into a structured prompt that instructs the model to strip out conversational filler, identify the chronological workflow, and organize the steps into a clean standard operating procedure.
- Have the prompt format the output into three specific sections: required inputs and tools, numbered sequential steps with clear handoffs, and quality verification criteria.

The manager then spends fifteen minutes reviewing and refining the output rather than four hours staring at a blank screen. This workflow turns tribal knowledge into documented, system-dependent assets in an afternoon. When processes are documented simply, your business becomes significantly easier to scale, cross-train, and eventually exit.