Most roles in a small business never get written down for one reason: the owner waits for the complete version, and in the meantime there is nothing. A hat, meaning everything someone else needs to fill a role without you, works even when it is partial.
Why hats do not get written
The cost of waiting shows up on the day somebody does not turn up. Perhaps flu, a family emergency or a resignation on a day's notice. If their role was never written, everything they knew how to do stays in their head, and their head is not there.
Most of the time a hat goes unwritten because the owner is waiting for the complete version to be ready. The writing gets put off, and the role stays in one person's head.
So the booklet suggests writing in three grades and starting with the smallest, called the instant hat. The first grade gets written today, and the later grades are built on top of it. Nobody starts with the full one.
Suppose a physiotherapist whose receptionist has left. She recorded a voice note to herself while driving, covering everything the receptionist would do on an ordinary day, and she transcribed it that evening. That was her first hat. It took one evening, and her next receptionist was productive on day one.
Picture the opposite: an owner who decided to put every role in order at once and opened one large document for the purpose. Half a year on, the document ran to two pages that nobody was using.
You do not have to do the writing alone, either. Whoever holds the role now usually describes it best, and you can ask them.
Any hat is better than no hat
This is the line to keep from the chapter. A partial hat, clumsy and written in a rush, still beats having none.
The reason is practical. You can fix a bad hat as you use it, because using it exposes where it falls short. A hat that was never written gives you nothing to correct.
Suppose a salon owner whose first version said to reply to messages quickly. A week later the receptionist asked how quick counts as quick, and the line became within the hour while the salon is open. The hat got better because it was there.
Or a café owner who started with three lines. Today it is a full page, and he would never have sat down to write a page.
How you know a hat is finished
A hat does not need to be complete to count as finished. The booklet has one test that closes any hat, and you can use it at any stage, including on a first draft. A hat that passes is finished for now. When it fails, what is missing is usually one thing or two, and the answer is rarely another ten pages.
Suppose a freelance bookkeeper who wrote a hat for closing a client's monthly return. The test showed one thing missing, which was where the login details are kept, and she added a line.
Now picture a shop owner who wrote a tidy three-page document, and it failed the test. A new person knew what to do and could not tell when they were finished, because two sentences were missing: a product and a number. The length of a document says nothing about whether anyone can work from it.
I have no time to write
At this point nearly every owner says the same thing: I am drowning in work and have no time to sit down and write hats.
The source answers this sharply. Staying in coping mode makes the demand to cope grow. It does not settle by itself, because every week spent only putting out fires creates more fires for the following week, and nothing becomes something you can hand over.
The way out runs through the work itself. You organise while you carry on coping, each time on whichever role burned most that week. Anyone who waits to stop everything and write for a month never gets there.
Suppose a shop owner who decided to sort things out after the holidays. The holidays were followed by a rush, then a break, then another rush, and two years on nothing had been written.
Or a garage owner who wrote one hat every Friday morning. After three months he had twelve hats, and he had not lost a single working day.
The booklet sums it up: you will never find a quiet moment to write the hats, since "the quiet moment arrives because you wrote them."
The booklet gives this chapter two short exercises, called build from scratch and do it, with the grades and the test set out in full. In the practice section at the end there is also one called apply.
A first hat only has to exist, because only an existing hat can be corrected.