Sending a message does not tell us where it landed.

A customer case had stalled between Sales and Fulfilment. Sales believed the order had been complete when it moved forward. Fulfilment found a field missing and sent it back. The account manager added the information, but by then the production slot had moved.

Something similar happened again. This time the missing information was different.

None of these cases told the organisation what the problem was. Together they were enough to make the problem difficult to ignore.

The first review did not produce one explanation.

• Sales thought commitments were being made before capacity was secure.
• Planning thought requests were arriving too late or changing after the work had been scheduled.
• Fulfilment thought ownership at the handover had become less clear after an earlier reorganisation.
• The systems team pointed to a configuration change that still reflected the old process in one part of the workflow.

A paper grouped the failures under weaknesses in the operating model. That description did not make the other explanations disappear, and it did not prove that the operating model was the single cause. It gave the organisation a problem around which ownership, work and resources could be organised.

A redesign followed.

Then, on Monday morning, communication became a named piece of work.