The Work Happens in the Gaps Between Teams

An organisation chart is a set of boxes. It tells you who is responsible for what, and it is reassuringly tidy. The trouble is that very little important work happens inside a single box. It happens on the lines between them — in the handoffs, the shared dependencies, the decisions that need two functions to agree. And the lines, unlike the boxes, usually have no owner.

Ask why a large initiative stalled and the answer is rarely that a team failed at its own job. It is that something fell into the gap between two teams, each of whom reasonably believed it belonged to the other. Business assumed technology had it; technology assumed business would decide. The work did not fail loudly. It simply sat, unowned, until it became a problem too large to ignore.

Nobody is responsible for the gap

The single most useful question in any complex programme is also the least glamorous: who owns this. Not who works on it, not who is interested in it, but who is accountable when it goes wrong. In healthy organisations the answer is quick and unambiguous. In struggling ones it produces a long pause, some glancing around the room, and eventually a name offered without much conviction.

This is why I treat the seams between functions as first-class work, not as something that will sort itself out once everyone is busy. Naming an owner for a shared outcome, agreeing where one team's responsibility ends and another's begins, and making those boundaries explicit — this is unspectacular, and it is where programmes are quietly won or lost. It is also why the operating model matters as much as the strategy: it decides whether the gaps have owners at all.

Good leaders spend a disproportionate amount of their time in these spaces. They translate between the language of the business and the language of technology so that both can decide with confidence. They notice when something is drifting because no one feels responsible, and they attach a name to it before it becomes a crisis. Much of this never appears on a plan, because plans describe boxes, and this is work on the lines.

The instinct, when a programme is in trouble, is to look inside the teams and ask who is underperforming. More often the honest answer is that everyone is doing their own job well, and the failure lives in the space no one was asked to hold. Fixing that is not a matter of working harder inside the boxes. It is a matter of deciding, deliberately, who owns the lines.