Reduce handoff

Before you carefully design a transfer of work between people, check whether that transfer needs to exist at all, because the cheapest handoff is the one you delete.

Your father runs out of blood pressure pills again. The chain you built goes like this: he calls you, you text your sister because she has the doctor's portal login, she messages the nurse, the nurse sends the renewal to the pharmacy, the pharmacy texts him. Five people, four days, and every time it stalls somewhere different. You keep trying to fix the chain by being faster in your link, adding reminders, adding a shared note. The pills still run out.

Reduce handoff says the first question about any transfer is whether it should exist. The cue is a chain where a hop adds no safety and no knowledge, where the middle person only forwards. Ask of each hop: does this person catch errors, or add information nobody else has? If no, delete it. Connect the start to the end directly, or bundle two hops into one pair of hands. Here you set up pharmacy auto refill with standing authorization from the nurse, so the refill goes straight from pharmacy to your father. What changes is that four fragile links become one real handoff you can wire carefully. Do not cut a hop that exists as a deliberate second pair of eyes, or one that carries judgment you cannot see from where you stand.