Test shareability by having an unfamiliar person execute…

When This Fires

• After documenting a workflow you intend to share with others
• When shared workflows produce frequent questions from executors
• When your "clear" documentation keeps requiring verbal explanations to supplement it
• Complements Competent stranger test for workflow steps — could someone… (competent stranger test) with the actual testing protocol rather than the thought experiment

Common Failure Mode

Helping during the test: the unfamiliar person stumbles, and you immediately explain. This feels helpful but defeats the test — you've just used verbal tacit knowledge transfer instead of documenting it. The documentation remains insufficient, and the next executor will stumble at the same point without you there to explain.

The Protocol

(1) Find someone unfamiliar with the workflow. They should have general competence in the domain but no specific knowledge of your process. (2) Ask them to execute the workflow using only the documentation. Critically: do not help. Do not explain, clarify, or supplement. Watch silently. (3) Record every stumble: where did they pause? What questions did they ask (even if you didn't answer)? Where did they go wrong? Where did they succeed but took a different path than intended? (4) After the test, review the stumble list. Each stumble is a documentation gap. Update the workflow to address every single one. (5) Re-test with a different unfamiliar person. Repeat until someone can execute the entire workflow without stumbling. Two clean runs = shareable.