Fifteen minutes, no preparation. Ask them of yourself, or of someone who runs something you care about.
These are the questions we ask in the first hour of any engagement. They are published in full because they work whether or not we are in the room — and because a question you have to pay for is not much of a question.
Ask them in order. Do not take notes while the other person answers. The order matters: each one is only answerable because of the one before it.
“ถ้าคุณพ่อหายไปเดือนนึง ติดต่อไม่ได้เลย — อะไรจะหยุด?”
What it finds: the dependency. Nobody has an abstract answer to this — it forces a concrete list. Substitute whoever the business actually runs through; it is not always the founder.
“อะไรที่ไม่มีวันเปลี่ยน ต่อให้เปลี่ยนได้ก็ไม่เปลี่ยน?”
What it finds: the actual value. This is the one people get emotional at, and that is the signal — it usually points at something real that thirty years of survival selected for. Whatever comes out here is what a handover must protect.
“แล้วอะไรที่อยากเปลี่ยนพรุ่งนี้เลย?”
What it finds: the mechanisms. Habits, systems, workarounds, the spreadsheet that runs procurement. These were built for conditions that have since changed — which makes them candidates for retirement, not failures.
“มีใครอีกไหมที่รู้ว่าทำไมข้อสองถึงสำคัญ?”
What it finds: whether any of it is transferable. The answer is usually a pause, and then “…nobody.” That pause is the whole problem, and it is the reason succession is hard even in businesses that are doing well.
What to do with the answers. Question 2 is what must survive. Question 3 is what may be replaced. Confusing the two is how good businesses get modernised into worse ones — and how founders end up feeling erased by their own successors. Question 4 tells you how much time you have.
If you would rather have this structured for you, the Dependency Map does exactly that, in your browser, and keeps nothing.