HANDOFF

Wire every transfer with a trigger, traveling state, required output, decision rights, check, failure path, and feedback.

You leave for two weeks of vacation and hand a live client project to a colleague with a 20-minute walkthrough and a "ping me if anything explodes." You return to find the client irritated, a decision made that was not hers to make, and a critical email that sat unanswered because each of you assumed the other had it. The components were fine. The transfer was the failure.

HANDOFF is a seven-field checklist for wiring any consequential transfer of work. Hook: what event starts the transfer and who notices. Assumptions and state: what facts, prior decisions, and uncertainties travel with the work. Needed output: the exact format, deadline, and acceptance criteria for what comes back. Decision rights: who owns the outcome, who may act, approve, override, escalate. Observable check: the test that verifies the transfer landed, such as a teach-back. Failure path: the timeout, fallback, or emergency route. Feedback and filing: where results and corrections get recorded. The cue is any transfer you are about to do informally where a dropped ball would be costly. Run the seven fields in writing, even briefly, before you leave. What changes is that work stops mutating or dying in the gap between people. For trivial transfers, a full HANDOFF is bureaucracy; reserve it for consequential ones.