The Finding
The multi-year study led by Donald Sull of MIT Sloan School of Management, with Rebecca Homkes of London Business School and the LSE Centre for Economic Performance, surveyed more than 250 companies and several thousand managers on why strategy execution breaks down. Its central and most cited finding was specific: only 9% of managers reported being able to rely on colleagues in other functions and units all of the time, with roughly half saying they could rely on them most of the time. The researchers’ interpretation was direct — execution failure in most organisations is primarily a cross-unit coordination problem, not a vertical alignment problem. The processes connecting strategy to individual teams tend to work; it is the connective tissue between teams that most often fails.
What It Means in Practice
A handoff is the operational unit in which this finding actually plays out. Every point where work passes from one team, function, or system to another is, in effect, a small test of exactly the cross-unit reliance the Sull, Homkes and Sull research measured — and the research suggests that test fails, in whole or in part, far more often than most organisations assume.
This is why handoffs, specifically, tend to accumulate disproportionate risk as an organisation grows. Within a single team, coordination is usually direct: a shared manager, a shared context, frequent informal contact. None of that necessarily exists between teams. A handoff crosses precisely the boundary the research identifies as least reliable — and it does so repeatedly, every time work moves, which means even a modest per-handoff failure rate compounds quickly across a process with several such boundaries in sequence.
Growth makes this worse for a structural reason rather than a behavioural one. As an organisation grows, work typically passes through more distinct functions before it is complete — more specialisation means more handoffs, not fewer. Each additional handoff is another instance of the cross-unit reliance problem the research describes, and the overall reliability of a multi-step process falls multiplicatively with each additional low-reliability link added to the chain, even if no individual handoff gets any worse in isolation. A process that felt reliable with three handoffs can feel meaningfully less reliable with six, purely as a consequence of adding links, without any single link having deteriorated at all.
Where It Varies
By organisational distance. Handoffs between teams with a shared manager, shared location, or frequent informal contact tend to be more reliable than handoffs crossing greater organisational or physical distance — closer to the reliable end of the research’s spectrum rather than the unreliable end.
By how explicit the receiving requirement is. Where the receiving team’s actual requirements have been made explicit to the sending team in advance, handoffs perform measurably better than where each side operates on its own assumption of what the other needs.
By process length. Longer processes, with more sequential handoffs, are disproportionately vulnerable, because unreliability compounds across each additional link rather than simply adding up.
By how recently the organisation restructured. Newly formed team boundaries tend to have the least-established handoff reliability, since the informal trust and shared context that partly compensates for structural gaps has not yet had time to develop.
There is a compounding consequence worth stating directly: because unreliability compounds multiplicatively across sequential handoffs, the relationship between process length and overall reliability is not intuitive. A process with three handoffs, each individually reliable 90% of the time, completes without any handoff failure only around 73% of the time. Extend the same process to six handoffs at the same individual reliability, and the equivalent figure falls to roughly 53% — a process that fails, somewhere along its length, close to half the time, without any single handoff having become any less reliable than it always was. This is precisely the kind of compounding effect that makes handoff risk so easy to underestimate when each link is assessed only on its own.
A further misconception worth naming: because a handoff failure is typically visible only at the point where it is finally noticed — often well downstream from where it originated — the true origin of the failure is frequently misattributed to whichever team happened to be holding the work when the problem became visible, rather than to the specific boundary crossing where the actual miscommunication occurred.
This misattribution has a further consequence worth tracing through. If the team holding the work when a failure surfaces is consistently blamed for failures that actually originated at an earlier handoff, that team accumulates a reputation for unreliability it may not have earned — while the actual point of failure, further upstream, remains uninvestigated because it has never been visibly implicated. Over time, this can distort an organisation’s internal sense of where its weakest links genuinely are, directing improvement effort toward the team most often left holding a problem rather than the boundary where the problem actually began.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- How many distinct handoffs does the organisation’s most important process currently pass through, and has that number grown as the organisation has grown?
- Where in the organisation would the Sull, Homkes and Sull finding — that only a minority of managers fully trust cross-unit reliance — be most likely to hold true?
- Which handoffs have an explicit, shared understanding of what “received correctly” means, and which rely on each side’s own assumption?
This perspective is part of Operations.
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