Ask an organisation how work happens and it hands you artifacts: job descriptions, process maps, SOPs. Watch the work instead and you'll see something different — a senior adjuster glancing at three systems and deciding in ninety seconds; a finance lead approving one exception and escalating an identical-looking other. The difference between the artifact and the reality is judgment, and judgment lives in verbs.
Why documentation keeps failing
Documentation is a snapshot; work is a stream. The SOP describes the happy path as of last year's reorg. The real decisions — the thresholds people actually use, the precedents they actually recall, the smells that trigger escalation — never make it into the doc, because writing them down is nobody's job and everybody's overhead. So the organisation keeps outcomes and discards reasoning, then wonders why every new hire takes a year to season and every AI pilot behaves like a new hire.
Capturing verbs as a by-product
The alternative is to capture judgment where it is exercised. In a gated pipeline, every consequential decision already passes a review surface: the approver sees the case, the rationale and the policy, and signs. That signature moment is the harvest point. The decision, its inputs, the policy version applied and the human's correction (if any) are recorded as a matter of course — not as documentation work, but as the work itself.
Accumulate those moments and patterns emerge: this is the threshold the team really uses; these two document types always trigger verification; this exception category always escalates to legal. Each pattern, validated by an expert, becomes a skill — judgment with a signature: who decides, on what inputs, within which policy.
From skills to a different operating model
Once verbs are skills, the function's economics invert. Volume work — the cases squarely inside policy — runs as automation with rationale attached. Human attention concentrates on genuine exceptions, on quality, and on improving the skills themselves. In our own 45-day function-rebuild playbook, this is the pivotal week: the moment the team sees its own judgment running as a governed skill, the conversation shifts from "will AI replace us" to "what should we teach it next".
Job descriptions describe who sits where. Verbs describe how value gets made. Capture the verbs, and you finally have an operations layer you can inspect, improve — and run.