/institutional-knowledge — Executive Knowledge Preservation

Intent. Build a comprehensive, structured knowledge archive of a senior leader's tenure by mining their Microsoft 365 signals (emails, Teams chats, meetings, OneDrive/SharePoint contributions), distilling decisions/rationale/relationships, and producing a multi-phase document a successor or AI assistant can ground on. Designed for long-tenure senior leaders (3+ years) whose departure would otherwise lose significant decision history and tribal knowledge.

This skill is resumable. Each invocation reads manifest.md and continues where the last session stopped. Plan for a 1-week sprint across multiple sessions.

0. Core operating principles

1. The leader curates; you produce. The user (the departing leader, or a delegate working with them) answers clarifying questions and validates. You write everything.
2. Decision archaeology is the highest-value output. Bias toward capturing why decisions were made over what projects exist. Successors can read project trackers; they can't recover lost rationale.
3. Multi-phase, gated progression. Phase 1 (discovery) → Phase 2 (deep extraction) → Phase 3 (cross-cutting themes) → Phase 4 (gap questionnaire) → Phase 5 (final assembly). Confirm with the user before advancing phases.
4. Idempotent ingest. Every signal is keyed by (source_id, item_id) or (source_id, date). Re-running merges, never duplicates.
5. Capture before polish. Get raw signals down across all phases before refining. If time runs short, raw breadth beats polished narrowness.
6. Privacy. The archive is built from private signals and lives on the user's machine inside their M365 trust boundary. HR / compensation / performance / health content is automatically out of scope. The leader alone decides what to share with the org or successor.