Most businesses optimize their silos. Few optimize what happens between them

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Most businesses optimize their silos. Few optimize what happens between them

Podcast Episode · Process Debt · 05/16/2025 · 18m

If you’ve been in a growing company long enough, you’ve seen it. Every team tunes its own instrument. Sales gets sharper, CS gets faster, product gets leaner. And yet the song still sounds off. Why? Because most businesses optimize the silo, not the handoff.

We obsess over what happens inside a team and forget what happens between teams. It’s the white space that kills flow. Ask someone what they do and you’ll often hear, “I click the button.” Ask what happens after the click and you’ll get a shrug. The black box is comfortable. Inputs go in. Outputs show up. Meanwhile, the downstream team gets a flood of mismatched tickets and missing context, and the customer experiences the seams.

Here’s a familiar picture: service inboxes that only thread replies with a tracking token. The first email lacks the token. People CC five teammates. The system spawns duplicates. Ops now spends cycles merging cases while leaders protect their response-time SLA like it’s sacred scripture. The metric looks great. The process bleeds.

Or think about the sales comp plan designed for “new accounts” that forgets to ask if those accounts should exist. Humans are excellent at hitting the target they’re given, even if it’s the wrong wall. Incentives overfit the silo. The system pays the tax.

The turn: the real performance gains aren’t in polishing the inside of a silo. They’re responsible for architecting the handoffs. That’s where process debt accumulates — in the baton drop. You don’t fix it with another dashboard. You fix it by getting curious about what happens one step upstream and one step downstream from you.

A lesson from healthcare sticks with me. An ER trying to cut wait times didn’t just “work faster.” They mapped the handoffs. Lab said, “We don’t even know a test is coming until it arrives. We haven’t staffed for that.” Imaging said, “X-rays we can turn; CTs jam the system.” The solution wasn’t heroics. It was re-routing: bring the most-needed tests to the ER, train staff, stage the right equipment, and pre-decide where patients go next. Wait times dropped because the baton stopped hitting the floor.

You can do the same thing in your org without buying a single new tool:

• Ask for outcomes, not actions. When someone says “I click the button,” follow with “What usable thing leaves your hands, and who uses it next?” Name the artifact — a payload, a case, a file, a field set — and the consumer. If the artifact or the consumer is fuzzy, you have found debt.

• Inspect where metrics are gamed. If a report looks flawless at the top level, click down one layer. Then one more. Empty shells of activity hide under pretty SLAs. Align the metric to the system outcome (clean merge rate, first-time-right, end-to-end cycle) and down-weight vanity measures.

• Collapse the cycle time of a handoff once. You don’t need a transformation program. Get the three owners of a broken handoff in the same room for two hours. Build the “golden path” on a whiteboard. Identify the single field, flag, or file that would prevent 80% of rework. Ship that.

• Codify the handshake. Put one sentence at the top of your playbook: “If you give me X with A, B, C filled, I will deliver Y within Z.” That’s your contract. Make it visible. Incentivize it. Defend it.

• Automate the obvious. Auto-reply with the token. Normalize the attachment name. Validate the required fields before submitting. These aren’t “nice to haves.” They are guardrails that make it harder to do the wrong thing and trivial to do the right one.

If you’re an IC, give yourself permission to be stubborn about one ugly handoff this month. Trace it upstream and downstream. Put names on the seams. If you’re a manager, measure the seam itself. Reward teams for making life easier for the next team, not just for hitting their local target. The fastest way to create capacity is to stop creating rework.

Process Debt Truth: Work rarely dies inside a silo — it dies in the handoff. Fix the handshake, and the song finally sounds like music.