Nuggetz glossary

The pieces

Three nouns carry the whole product. A knowledge interview produces answers from a respondent; the answers become nuggets; the settled nuggets become a handbook.

Nugget

A nugget is one self-contained piece of operational knowledge, taken from what a colleague actually said.

Cutting an interview into nuggets is what makes two people's answers comparable. A transcript is a record of one conversation; a nugget is a claim about how the work is done, small enough to agree or disagree with. Every nugget keeps its link back to the words that produced it, so a reader can always see the evidence rather than taking the summary on trust. Each one carries a type and, once more than one person has answered, a state.

Handbook

A handbook is the document a colleague follows, assembled from the nuggets that have settled.

One handbook covers one subject — an escalation procedure, a handover, the way a decision actually gets made. It is a document, not a place: Nuggetz writes it, and the knowledge base your team already reads is where it belongs, by Markdown export or a share link when that is quicker. It does not rewrite itself. When the underlying nuggets change, Nuggetz says so and offers a rewrite you approve, and you edit the nugget rather than the generated prose, so the document and its evidence never drift apart.

Respondent

A respondent is the colleague answering a knowledge interview.

Not a user, and not a panellist. Respondents need no account and no seat: they open one link, give a name on the first screen, and answer by speaking or typing. Email is optional. The word matters because it names the person whose experience the whole exercise depends on — usually someone senior enough that the cost of their time is the real constraint on capturing anything at all.

The five nugget types

Every nugget is one of five kinds. The types exist because a procedure made only of steps loses precisely the part that took years to learn.

How-to

A how-to is a step or sequence: the part of the work that a written procedure would already cover.

The least interesting type, and still necessary — a handbook made only of judgment and warnings would have no spine to hang them on. How-tos are also the type most likely to be already documented somewhere, which makes them useful for spotting where the written process and the real one have parted company.

Judgment call

A judgment call is a decision an experienced person makes by reading signals rather than following a rule.

When to escalate. Which customer gets the exception. Whether that number is worth chasing. This is the type that never survives the request to "write up your process", because the person making the call often cannot state the rule — they can only describe the last three times they made it. A conversation can ask for those three times.

Gotcha

A gotcha is a trap: something that looks right, goes wrong, and is only known to people who have been caught by it.

The system that reports success before the work has finished. The field that must be set before the other one or the record silently breaks. Gotchas are almost never written down, because nobody schedules time to document a thing that has already stopped surprising them. They are also what a new joiner hits in week two.

Why

A why is the reason behind a step, a rule or a constraint.

Whys are what let someone depart from the procedure safely. A team that knows the steps but not the reasons follows them into situations where they no longer apply, and cannot tell an unusual case from a broken one. This is also the type that decays fastest: the reason outlives the person who remembers it by about one staff change.

Who / where

A who or where names the person to ask or the place a thing lives.

The least glamorous type and often the most immediately useful — the routing knowledge that makes an organisation navigable. Who actually approves this. Which of the four spreadsheets is current. Who to call when the vendor is unresponsive. It is also the most perishable, so a handbook that carries it should be revisited when people move.

The four states

Once more than one colleague has answered, every nugget carries a state. The states exist to prevent false consensus — a document that reads as settled when only one person has spoken is worse than no document.

Confirmed

Confirmed means several colleagues independently said the same thing.

It means internal corroboration and nothing more. It does not mean anyone checked the claim against the outside world, against a system of record, or against what is actually true — Nuggetz is not an audit-grade record and does not present itself as one. A team can be confidently, unanimously wrong, and a confirmed nugget would record that agreement faithfully. Read it as "this is what the team believes and does", which is exactly the thing a new colleague needs to know.

Single source

Single source means one person said it and nobody else has spoken to it.

Not a warning, and not a lesser kind of truth — most knowledge worth capturing starts here, and one expert is enough to begin. It is a statement about coverage: this rests on one person, which is either fine or is precisely the key-person risk you set out to find. Interviewing a second colleague is what moves it.

Conflict

A conflict is two experienced colleagues describing the same work differently.

The most valuable output of the whole exercise, and the one no document written by a single author can produce. A conflict is not an error to be resolved away — it usually means the work genuinely varies by case, that the two people serve different customers, or that one of them is working from a rule that changed. Conflicts stay visible under "Still unresolved" in the handbook rather than being flattened into a confident sentence.

Gap

A gap is a question nobody could answer.

A finding, not a failure. A gap says the knowledge is not in the room — it left with someone, it never existed, or the people who have it were not asked. Gaps are the argument for interviewing one more person, and the honest answer to "is the handbook finished?", which is usually no in a way worth stating out loud.

Where these come from

Every term above describes something the product actually does today. The five steps that produce them — designing the interview, sharing one link, the interview itself, the cross-checking, the handbook — are on the how it works page, along with what Nuggetz does not do.

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