The Wary Muddletee

In setups with this shape, the catalogue can look tidy while the organisation has stopped believing the search box. The answer exists, but everyone trusts the colleague who bookmarked it two years ago. Under the wary toad-and-lanyard presence, findability decay becomes a parallel support culture: local labels, copied links, and forms renamed for survival.

Left alone, this shows up as the 30–50% of no-result queries that keep becoming tickets, Slack pings and local instructions. Add the 10–25% of request cycle time trapped in bad form paths, and the desk becomes the organisation’s memory rather than its support function.

Search becomes the place people check first, because it returns the thing they meant rather than the thing somebody misfiled. Requests feel guided instead of forensic. People stop carrying tribal knowledge through Teams chats.

It is not a year-long rebuild; the first move is four to six weeks and sits in the mid-teens, with AI Search the one capability to confirm. The full plan has nine moves, so it can start with findability, widen into forms and presentation, or stay deliberately narrow.