Handoff Soup: The Real Reason Work Gets Stuck
You've seen it. A task moves from sales to ops, then to finance, and somewhere around the third inbox, the thread goes quiet. Someone asks, 'Where are we on that?' and nobody can say. The spreadsheet gets blamed, but it was only the messenger. We've spent years watching teams run their businesses on shared sheets. The cells were fine. The formulas were fine. What broke was the moment the work left one person's hands and entered another's. That moment—we call it a handoff—is where context dies, accountability blurs, and 'almost done' becomes 'lost forever.' Let's talk about why that happens and what actually fixes it. Why Your Team Is Drowning in Status Emails The handoff blind spot Pull up the Slack history from your last project. Scroll past the planning noise and find the moment someone typed “almost done with the draft, just need the numbers from finance.