Calendar presence, response latency, and meeting drift carry more signal about who actually decides than the reporting hierarchy. Build a monthly influence map that compares observed decision flow against the org chart — and flag the gap.
Every Claude session starts from zero unless something carries the org forward. CLAUDE.md is that something — a persistent context layer that encodes team topology, current priorities, and the decisions you have already paid for. Treat it as a config file and you keep paying the coordination tax.
Four layers between a generic assistant and a colleague: always-on slow facts, on-demand skill files, live MCP data, and a persistent entity graph. One architecture. Zero fine-tuning. The teams that ship all four cut correction cycles in half.
Meeting transcripts produce decisions. The decisions vanish into a Notion graveyard within thirty days. A two-agent Cowork workflow extracts structured records and attaches review triggers that fire when conditions actually change — not on a calendar.
Senior engineers carry the runbooks nobody wrote. Then they retire. "Document everything" is the ask that produces nothing. A structured-interview pipeline that turns one hour into searchable institutional memory before the bus-factor goes to zero.