Documentation is easy to downgrade because it often arrives after the exciting part of the work.
But the MOMC material suggests a better framing: documentation is operating infrastructure.
It is part of what makes a system transferable, legible, and maintainable. It allows someone new to enter the system without starting from zero. It reduces dependency on memory. It helps a team align around the same model of what exists and why.
When documentation is weak, the organization pays for it in slower onboarding, repeated confusion, hidden assumptions, and brittle ownership. When documentation is strong, it becomes one of the quietest sources of scale.
This is why SOPs, case studies, playbooks, dashboards, and structured notes matter so much. They are not just records. They are part of the operating layer that keeps understanding alive after the first builder steps back.
Teams that take documentation seriously are often not being bureaucratic. They are making the system survivable.