# Key Takeaway

  • Smoke Signal: Everyone’s working hard. Nothing’s moving faster.
  • The Fire: The organization is optimized around silos instead of value flow.
  • Question for Leaders: Why does this work require so many handoffs?

One of my favorite things to do with clients is ask a simple question: “Walk me through how this work actually gets done.” Then we start drawing it. It starts in Product, moves to Engineering, then UX, Finance, Legal, back to Product, over to Marketing, through Operations, and eventually to a steering committee. Somewhere around the eighth box on the whiteboard, somebody usually laughs because they realize they’ve accidentally designed a relay race.

That’s the smoke signal. Every handoff feels reasonable on its own. One team needs to review it, one person needs to approve it, and one group needs visibility. None of those decisions seems like a big deal until you string ten of them together.

Every handoff introduces waiting, interpretation, and another opportunity for work to stall, change direction, or lose momentum. The issue usually isn’t that people aren’t working hard. It’s that the work has too many places to stop.

Organizations spend a lot of time optimizing individual teams through better tools, clearer roles, stronger functional processes, and more efficient meetings. They spend much less time optimizing what happens between teams. But customers don’t experience functions. They experience the entire journey, and every unnecessary handoff slows that journey down.

When work feels slower than it should, don’t just ask who’s involved. Ask why the work has to change hands so many times. If you followed one initiative from idea to delivery, how many teams would touch it before the customer ever saw the result? Every handoff is a clue, and every unnecessary handoff is an opportunity to create speed.

# Look Beneath the Surface

If everyone is working hard but nothing is moving faster, the issue may not be effort. It may be how work flows across teams, functions, and decision points.

Question for leaders: Why does this work require so many handoffs?

Explore Related Smoke Signals

Organizational friction rarely shows up in just one place. Continue exploring related signals:

View All Smoke Signals

# Seeing Similar Signals?

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