Person to Handoff

When blame lands on an individual in coordinated work, look instead at the handoff or interface nearest the failure.

An order shipped to the wrong customer, and by Monday the story has hardened: Priya messed up. She's apologetic, everyone moves on, and three weeks later it happens again with someone else's name attached. In coordinated work, blame that lands on an individual is usually landing one step short of the truth, because the failure typically lives where work changes hands, not inside any single person.

Person to Handoff is a 30-second redirection for exactly this cue: blame is centering on an individual inside a multi-person process. The procedure: take the person out of the sentence and replace them with the interaction, handoff, or interface nearest the failure. "Priya entered the wrong address" becomes "the handoff between the sales sheet and the fulfillment system requires manual retyping with no confirmation step." Now examine that interface: what does it assume, what does it fail to check, who else has stumbled there? It works when the fix changes from "be more careful" (which never survives a busy week) to a concrete redesign of the handoff, like auto-populating the address field. The spec's warning is important: preserve genuine individual accountability. Some failures really are one person's negligence, and using this move to dissolve all responsibility is its own distortion.