Handoff Failure
Each team is competent. The space between them is competence-free.
Poverty among the wise hurts less than wealth among the ignorant. Valluvar values competence over resources. Your customers experience the seams between your teams. Not the teams themselves. The seams. Sales hands off to onboarding. Onboarding hands off to implementation. Implementation hands off to support. At each handoff, context is lost. The customer repeats their story. The new team asks the same questions. Each team is competent. The space between them is competence-free.
When British Airways merged with Iberia to form IAG in 2011, the result was a dual-headed bureaucracy that couldn’t make a fleet decision for two years. I found the structural problem: BA’s London headquarters and Iberia’s Madrid headquarters maintained parallel executive teams, parallel finance functions, and parallel strategies. Willie Walsh, the IAG CEO, described it as ‘two airlines pretending to be one.’ The bureaucratic bloat wasn’t an accident. It was the price of a merger that preserved both egos instead of creating a single identity.
The baton drop happens in the transfer zone. In athletics, relay races are won or lost in the transfer zone, the designated area where one runner passes the baton to the next. Each runner is fast. Each is trained. But the baton transfer is a different skill. Organizational handoffs are transfer zones: the space between teams where information, context, and relationships must transfer seamlessly. Each team is competent. But the handoff is a separate skill that nobody practices. The customer doesn’t experience your teams. They experience the transitions between them.
Map one customer journey from end to end. Mark every handoff point. At each one, ask: what information is lost? That information loss is the baton drop. Fix one handoff this month.
That dropped connection has a name. Handoff Failure. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Untie The Knot
Uproot
Handoffs failed because each team owned its stage but nobody owned the transition. Context transfer was assumed, not designed.
Navigate
Every handoff has a documented protocol: what information transfers, in what format, and who confirms receipt. Handoffs are owned, not assumed.
Tool
DMG / Transition Protocol: the framework that designs handoffs as deliberately as workflows. When transitions are designed, context stops disappearing.
Implement
Map one customer journey. Mark every handoff point. Ask: what information is lost at each? Fix one handoff this month.
Emerge
When handoffs are designed, customers experience seamlessness, context compounds across teams, and the organisation stops losing intelligence at every boundary.