Most process failures don’t live inside a step. They live in the gap between steps.
The handoff is where assumptions go unspoken. Team A finishes their part and considers it done. Team B picks it up and discovers it’s half-done — but only after they’ve already built something on top of it.
This is why auditing a process by looking at individual steps is almost always misleading. Each step can look clean. The people executing them can be competent, careful, even excellent. And the system still breaks.
What actually needs scrutiny is the transition: what leaves one stage, what arrives at the next, and whether those two things match. They often don’t. Not because anyone failed — but because nobody defined the contract.
Good systems make handoffs explicit. They name what a completed step produces. They specify what the next step requires. And they make the gap visible enough that a mismatch gets caught before it compounds.
Scott Andrew Alpaugh has seen this pattern repeat across industries: the work looks fine, the people are capable, but nothing defined what “done” actually means at the boundary. So “done” means something different to everyone involved.
Fix the handoff. Define the output. Make the contract visible.
That’s usually where the leverage is.