I had a plan to stop paying for hotels in Darwin.
My son has his own place there now, so I ordered a bed for his spare room that I can use when I travel up for work. He set up a plain metal bed frame before I arrived.
The shop's app said the mattress would be delivered at least three days before I landed. When I landed, the app still said that. I rang the couriers, and the woman on the phone said it might arrive by the end of the week, or perhaps the one after. She didn't know why the app was saying otherwise.
That left me with a slatted metal bed base and nothing to put on it. We took the timber top off the pool table he'd bought on Facebook Marketplace and laid it across the metal rungs, and his very thin swag mattress went on top. I tried to sleep there. The next morning I hosted a breakfast.
The mattress was delivered while I was out. I'm fairly sure it had been sitting in a distribution centre in town the whole time, waiting for someone to put it on a truck and deliver it. I had, technically, saved the cost of a hotel.
Cross-organisation projects stall in the same way.
The handoff between stages
Avoidable delays can arise in cross-functional projects where a stage in one area depends on one in another. The first stage finishes and if nobody is chasing, it can sit there, done, until someone goes looking for it.
The people who finished it think the job is complete. The people who need it haven't started their part, so they have nothing to report. The status report carries on showing green against the due date, the way the app kept showing me a delivery window after both days had passed.
Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership at Harvard Business School, said:
“For most people the work is interdependent: what I do affects what you do.” — Amy Edmondson
Yet Atlassian’s State of Teams 2025 found just 20% of knowledge workers feel confident that their team has an effective process for quickly informing other teams of decisions that may impact their work.
The reverse happens too. A stage that nobody has started can show green. Green usually means nobody has reported a problem. It says nothing about whether anyone has even begun. Nothing is late yet because nothing has moved, and the report reads as healthy until the due date is imminent.
The failures happen in the handoffs between the stages in the status report, where finished work is waiting and unstarted work still looks fine. By the time that comes to light, the conversation is about recovering time instead of using it. For CEOs, senior executives and boards, that usually means finding out late that a priority stopped moving months ago.
Ask about the handoff
In a status conversation, ask about:
- Who picks this up when it is done, and how will they know?
- What’s the latest date this needs to start to get to done on time?
- How will we find out if it hasn't started or if progress has stalled?
- How will you know what percentage of work is complete on a regular basis?
The mattress was in town the whole time, and nobody’s job was to tell me. A red, amber, green status report without clearly defined boundaries for reporting leaves the same gap.
I work with boards and executive teams on turning strategy into a practical game plan for action. If you are setting 2027 priorities, a second view now can show where your plan has a handoff nobody owns before the year gets underway. Reach out and tell me what you are working on.
Written with AI assistance. The thinking and the final wording are mine.
