The symptom
Consider an organisation where a customer receives two separate calls in the same week from two different parts of the same company, asking overlapping questions. From the customer’s side, it looks like the organisation isn’t talking to itself. From inside, the explanation is less obvious than it appears.
Both teams involved have access to the same customer record system. Neither checked whether another team had recently made contact — not because the information wasn’t available, but because nothing in how either team’s work is structured or measured gave them a reason to look. No process prompts the check. No measure penalises the duplication when it happens. The information sat there, fully accessible, and simply wasn’t consulted.
Neither team, taken individually, did anything to warrant criticism. Each acted entirely within its own remit, on its own information, toward its own goals. The duplication is a property of the two teams’ interaction, not of either team’s conduct — which is exactly why it’s so hard to trace back to a specific decision or a specific person, and why “communicate better” rarely resolves it: there was no failed conversation to point to, only two conversations that never needed to happen but nothing stopped from happening anyway.
What leaders usually conclude
The instinctive diagnosis is poor internal communication — the two teams should talk to each other more. It’s a natural conclusion, and it isn’t entirely wrong, but it locates the problem in the wrong place. These teams weren’t failing to communicate directly with each other; they were failing to consult a shared resource that was already available to both of them. The gap isn’t between the teams. It’s between having access to information and having any structural reason to use it.
Encouraging the two teams to “communicate more” in response tends to produce exactly one outcome: a conversation about this specific incident, after the fact, which resolves this instance without touching the underlying condition that produced it. The next pair of teams sharing access to the same kind of information, with the same absence of any structural prompt to consult it, will very likely reproduce the same pattern — not because the lesson from the first incident wasn’t learned, but because the lesson was learned by two specific teams about one specific customer, rather than built into how the organisation as a whole uses shared information.
What the evidence suggests
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull’s research, published in Harvard Business Review and based on a multi-year study of more than 250 companies, found that the central obstacle to strategy execution in most organisations they studied was lateral coordination between units, rather than vertical alignment down through the hierarchy. Their data point on this is worth citing precisely: only 9% of managers said they could reliably count on colleagues in other functions and units to deliver all of the time, while around half said they could count on them most of the time. The strategy documents these organisations had produced typically said the right things about cross-team collaboration. What the research found breaking down was the coordination itself — the actual, ongoing checking-in between functions that a shared strategy assumes will simply happen because it’s been stated as important.
This scenario is a clean illustration of that gap. The organisation had already solved the access problem — both teams could see the same customer record. What it hadn’t solved, and likely hadn’t identified as a separate problem at all, was the incentive to actually consult it. Access and incentive are frequently treated as the same thing in strategy planning — give people the information and coordination will follow — when the research suggests they need to be addressed separately, because information sitting in a shared system creates no automatic pull toward using it.
This distinction tends to matter more as an organisation adds systems rather than fewer. Each new shared platform, dashboard or record system is usually justified, at least in part, by the promise of better visibility across teams — and each one genuinely does make more information technically available. What rarely gets addressed at the same time is whether anything about how teams are measured or structured gives them a reason to actually look. The result, over several years of well-intentioned system investment, can be an organisation with considerably more shared visibility than it has shared coordination.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- What does the organisation do with information it holds but has no structural reason to consult?
- Where two teams share access to something — a system, a customer record, a project plan — is there any measure or process that would surface it as relevant to both, or does relevance depend entirely on someone remembering to check?
- If this kind of duplication happened today, would anyone notice, or would it only surface the way it did here — from the customer, after the fact?
This perspective is part of Strategy Execution.
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