Two of your teams are both strong. Both work hard. Both make sound calls inside their own remit. And together, they keep producing something that does not add up.
The reflex is to treat it as a relationship problem.
So you reach for the social fix. More alignment meetings. Better communication. A session on trust. Get them in a room, get them talking, get them on the same page. It feels like the obvious lever, because the problem shows up between people.
But watch one case closely. The account team hands a deal to the solution team. It documents what the buyer said: the requirements, the criteria, a careful brief. The solution team takes the brief and builds the proposal. Both follow their process exactly. Both make reasonable decisions. And the proposal lands with the buyer in a frame the buyer does not quite recognise.
Nobody failed. Nobody was careless. Two sets of capable people, each exercising sound judgement in their own role, produced an incoherent result – because the handoff between them carried information, but not judgement. The account team passed on what the buyer said. What it could not pass on was what the buyer meant: the unspoken concern, the internal politics, the risk appetite it had read across months of contact. The solution team, handed the words, supplied its own interpretation. Both interpretations were reasonable. They were not the same.
That is the thing the relationship fix never touches. The problem was not the relationship between the teams.
It was the interface between them – what the handoff was, and was not, built to carry. No amount of trust or communication repairs an interface that was never designed to transfer judgement, only information.
And this is where most coordination advice has it backwards. Understanding can be shared. Judgement cannot. You can spread understanding across a whole organisation, everyone holding the same picture. But judgement is a choice, a choice carries responsibility, and responsibility does not survive being split – shared between two teams, it belongs to neither. “We decided” is, very often, the sound of no one having decided.
Which is why collective judgement lives at the interfaces, not inside the teams. The teams are usually fine. It is the handoffs that decide whether judgement holds or fragments – what must be resolved before something crosses, who owns it on each side, what has to travel besides the data. Design the interface around responsibility and judgement travels across it. Leave it carrying information alone, and capable people keep producing incoherent results, politely, forever.
This is also why consensus is a dangerous substitute for placement. Faced with coordination failure, the instinct is to get everyone to agree before anything moves. It feels safe. It feels inclusive. But consensus dissolves the one thing coordination actually needs: someone who owns the call. It softens the hard trade-offs into something everyone can tolerate, and it quietly teaches your most capable people that conviction is a liability. The alternative is not one person overruling the room. It is clear placement: authority that is unambiguous, interfaces that carry what they must, disagreement that does not stop the work, because no one is confused about who owns what.
So before the next alignment offsite, ask a sharper question. Not “do these teams get along?” but “where does judgement actually have to cross between them – and was that crossing ever built to carry it?” Coordination that keeps failing between good people is rarely a social problem underneath.
It is an architectural problem wearing a social one.
Where in your organisation are coordination problems actually symptoms of unclear judgement placement or weak interfaces rather than capability or collaboration failures?
This question closes a chapter of The Architecture of Commercial Performance, where the thinking behind it is developed in full.
