Most leaders can point to a dashboard full of strong departmental KPIs and still feel a quiet discomfort: the business is busy, talented people are working hard, and customers still experience friction.
The mismatch is usually structural.
Here, we describe a pattern we have seen in corporate roles and client work: teams optimise locally, handovers fail quietly, and leadership decisions slow down because visibility is weak. The result looks like “execution problems” on the surface, but the cause is usually misalignment across people, process, and systems.
The three traps that quietly drain performance
1. The departmental optimisation illusion
This is the belief that if each department hits its own targets, the organisation will thrive.
What happened before: improving e-commerce picking productivity created downstream pressure, increased damage, and worsened customer experience. The metric improved. The system degraded.
This is a known risk in measurement: when a measure becomes a target, it can distort behaviour and reduce the value of the measure. This is often summarised as Goodhart’s Law.
What it looks like in companies in 2026
- Marketing pushes lead volume, sales lose time on poor-fit leads.
- Operations push throughput, service absorbs quality fallout.
- Finance drives cost reductions, delivery capacity weakens.
What changes the outcome
- A small set of shared outcomes tied to the customer journey.
- Departmental KPIs that remain, but do not override end-to-end performance.
2. The critical handover problem
Most customer journeys are built from transitions: lead to sales, sales to onboarding, onboarding to delivery, delivery to support. Those are the points where businesses drop context, repeat work, and create delays.
Another example of this is a handover experience from a former client: an executive search firm collecting the same information three times. This is a classic handover failure: the customer experiences it as disorganisation, and the business experiences it as waste.
Handover breakdowns are well evidenced in other high-stakes environments like healthcare, where communication failures during handoffs are linked to errors and adverse outcomes. The domain is different, but the mechanism is the same: information loss, ambiguity, and inconsistent execution.
Common symptoms
- Customers asked the same questions repeatedly
- Work duplicated across teams
- “It depends who you get” service quality
- Blame between departments when things go wrong
What changes the outcome
- Clear ownership of the handover, not just the steps inside a department.
- A single source of truth for customer context, with lightweight standards for what must travel across the boundary.
3. The leadership visibility gap
Leaders often cannot answer basic questions with confidence:
- Where deals are won or lost
- Why customers churn
- Where bottlenecks truly sit
- Which channels produce durable returns
When executives do not trust the numbers, decisions slow down and meetings become debates over whose spreadsheet is correct.
This is where “shadow systems” appear: spreadsheets and side tools created to fill gaps left by disconnected systems. Research on shadow systems and shadow IT shows how often they emerge alongside ERPs and how they create data inconsistencies and control issues over time.
What changes the outcome
- Fewer systems doing more connected work.
- Reporting that is traceable to source data, so leaders trust what they see.
How these problems cascade into culture
What starts as process friction often ends as culture friction.
When processes are hard to follow or systems do not support the work, people adapt:
- They build workarounds.
- They stick to familiar routines.
- They create parallel ways of working.
There is solid research on workaround behaviour when information systems do not support employees’ tasks adequately, including how policy and attitudes interact with these workarounds.
Over time, the organisation normalises the workaround and then defends it. That is how operational issues become “how we do things here.”
Stop treating symptoms. Find the root cause.
We recommend two practical lenses:
One: Use the Five Whys
The Five Whys is a simple root-cause technique popularised through Toyota’s problem-solving culture, often attributed to Taiichi Ohno’s description of repeatedly asking “why” to reach underlying causes.
It works best when it is applied to a specific, observable problem and the answers are grounded in evidence, not opinion.
Two: Examine handover points
If you map a process and only optimise what happens inside departments, you miss the highest-friction zones. Handover points are frequently where information, accountability, and customer experience degrade.
A reliable question in workshops is: “Where does work slow down, and where do you feel the most frustration? "That is usually where value leaks.
Start with elimination, then simplify, then automate
Remove steps before improving them.
A practical sequence looks like:
- Eliminate steps that do not add value
- Move earlier actions that prevent downstream issues
- Simplify what remains
- Automate only once the process is stable and clear
This matters because automation can scale confusion just as easily as it scales efficiency.
A lightweight framework: People, Processes, Systems
People think transformation is a technology project. Transformation is interconnected work, with everyone involved. Questions to ask:
People
- Do teams collaborate across departments or protect turf?
- Do roles connect to customer outcomes?
- Are incentives aligned with end-to-end performance?
Processes
- Is execution consistent, or dependent on individuals?
- How many exceptions and workarounds exist?
- Is the process documented in a usable way?
Systems
- How many systems are involved in one customer journey?
- How much manual reconciliation occurs?
- Do leaders trust the reporting?
“Making Toast”: a practical way to map reality
The “Making Toast” exercise is intentionally simple: draw the process step-by-step using visuals, one step per sticky note, with multiple people mapping independently.
The value is not the drawings. The value is what becomes obvious:
- Where interpretations differ
- Where steps are duplicated
- Where bottlenecks hide
- Where the process exists in people’s heads, not in shared practice
It is a quick method for surfacing variance before investing in tools and change programmes.
Closing thought
Operational excellence is not achieved by making one department brilliant. It is achieved by getting the system to behave as one system.
KPIs still matter. They create focus and accountability. The shift is designing them to reinforce the customer journey and shared outcomes, so local wins do not create global damage.
Source notes
- Goodhart-style KPI distortion and common KPI failure modes (overview source).
- Five Whys background and Toyota attribution.