A month where the person who knows everything sat next to the person who does not and was not allowed to speak.
the rules, agreed in advance:
the second person drives, always
the expert may answer a direct question and may not
volunteer
anything the expert wanted to say goes in a document
afterwards, not during
an actual outage suspends the rules
what the document accumulated: 41 entries, of which 22
became runbook steps and 6 became automation.The silence is the mechanism — a helpful expert produces a shadowing month where nothing is learned and everything is watched. Writing down the interventions that were withheld turned tacit knowledge into a list, which is the artefact the exercise was actually for and would not have existed if the expert had simply explained things.