Why collaboration breaks down
It’s rarely a shortage of talent, effort or goodwill.
In brief
The problem sits between the boxes on the organisation chart.
Most organisations still run on a management model designed for more routine work, organised into functions and hierarchies. Today most of the value is created between those functions, and that’s where work stalls: at handoffs, in grey areas, and wherever responsibility is assumed rather than agreed. More meetings, another reorganisation, a new system or a few heroes can help for a while, but none of them changes how the connections are designed.
In practice
What it looks like.
01
Work waits longer between teams than it takes to do.
02
One team reworks what another team called finished.
03
Problems climb to senior people because nobody owns the handoff.
04
Meetings multiply to settle what an agreement should have settled.
“The process would be great if it wasn’t for the people.”
The people are usually fine. The connections between them were never designed.
An example
Where the time really went.
In one finance shared services centre, more than 40% of the month-end tasks were spent fixing problems created elsewhere in the process. Once the teams made their dependencies visible and agreed what each needed from the other, that work fell by half.
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