The Symptom
A particular kind of friction shows up almost universally as organisations grow: work that crosses a boundary between two teams arrives late, incomplete, or in the wrong shape more often than work that stays within one team. It is rarely dramatic. It shows up as a delay here, a query there, a piece of work sent back for clarification. Individually, each instance looks like an isolated lapse. Collectively, it becomes one of the most persistent and least understood costs of growth.
Consider an organisation where two teams — one that originates a piece of work and one that receives it — have operated this way for years. Roughly a third of handovers arrive incomplete. Nobody has ever treated this as a crisis, because no single incident is severe enough to warrant one. It has simply become a known feature of how the two teams work together.
What Leaders Usually Conclude
The default explanation is a performance problem. Someone is being careless, rushing, or not paying enough attention to what the next team needs. The instinct is to address it through reminders, tighter deadlines, or a conversation about standards. This explanation is attractive because it is simple, it assigns clear responsibility, and it does not require examining how the organisation itself is structured.
Why It Happens
The evidence on how organisations actually process information points somewhere less personal. Writing on organisation design, Jay Galbraith observed that the amount of information an organisation must process to complete its work rises with task uncertainty and with the number of interdependent parts involved — and that the way work is structured has to keep pace with that rising load or coordination failures follow almost mechanically. A handover between two teams is precisely this kind of interdependent boundary. It only works cleanly when both sides share an identical understanding of what “complete” means at that specific point of exchange.
In practice, that shared understanding is rarely written down anywhere. The sending team defines completeness according to what finishes their part of the work. The receiving team defines it according to what they need to start theirs. Both definitions can be entirely reasonable, internally consistent, and still not match each other — because nobody ever specified the interface between them. At a small scale, this gap gets closed informally: people sit near each other, overhear context, ask a quick question. As an organisation grows, that informal correction disappears faster than anyone plans for. The two definitions of “complete” stay unwritten, but the informal channel that used to reconcile them quietly goes away.
This is why the problem tends to be misread as a people issue. The friction is real, and it is measurable, but its source is structural: an undocumented interface between two functions, not a lapse in individual attention.
What It Looks Like in Practice
A few patterns recur across organisations experiencing this kind of friction:
The same handover point produces recurring queries, but each individual instance is treated as a one-off rather than a pattern.
Both teams involved believe they are meeting their own definition of “done” — and they are usually both right, by their own definition.
The friction is invisible in any single team’s metrics, because it lives in the space between two teams’ areas of accountability, not inside either one.
Attempts to fix it through individual coaching tend not to hold, because the underlying interface remains unspecified.
None of this means the organisation is dysfunctional. It means growth has outpaced the informal mechanisms that used to compensate for an unspecified boundary. The friction is often a reliable signal that two functions have grown apart faster than the interface between them has been made explicit — not that either function is underperforming.
Consequences and Common Misconceptions
Left unexamined, this kind of friction compounds in a way that is easy to underestimate. Each individual incident is small enough to absorb without comment, which is exactly why the pattern survives so long — nothing about any single instance triggers the kind of attention a larger failure would. Over time, though, the aggregate cost is real: repeated rework, delayed downstream work, and a background level of frustration between two teams who each, correctly, believe they are doing their job properly. That frustration is worth naming directly, because it is one of the more corrosive effects of this pattern. When each side is quietly convinced the other is at fault, and neither is, the relationship between the two teams degrades even though neither has actually done anything wrong.
A common misconception compounds the problem further: leaders often assume that if a handover has been happening the same way for years, it must, on some level, be working — the assumption being that a genuinely broken process would have forced a resolution by now. This is not a safe assumption. A friction point can persist indefinitely precisely because it is costly enough to notice but not costly enough to force anyone to address its actual cause, which is a different situation from either a genuinely working process or an obviously broken one. Longevity of a problem is not, on its own, evidence about its severity or its cause.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- Where in the organisation does work regularly cross from one team to another, and has anyone ever written down what “complete” means at that specific point?
- Are recurring handover problems being treated as individual performance issues when they recur at the same boundary regardless of who is involved?
- How was this handover managed when the organisation was smaller — and what informal mechanism disappeared as it grew?
- Has the persistence of this friction over time been read as evidence that it is tolerable, rather than as evidence that its actual cause has never been examined?
- Does the risk vary with the kind of boundary — are handovers between teams with very different professional backgrounds, such as a technical team passing work to a commercial one, more exposed than handovers within a single discipline, because the two sides are less likely to share unstated assumptions about what “complete” means?
- Are infrequent handovers more vulnerable than constant ones, given that a high-frequency exchange gets more chances to self-correct informally, even without anyone writing the interface down?
- Where two teams meet, who defines what complete means?
This perspective is part of Operations.
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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