The work between teams that no system counts

• The symptom: the handovers that never fail
• The usual explanation, and why it does not hold
• What keeps it invisible: four mechanisms
• Where this sits in the framework
• How to check this in your own organisation
• The structural response
• Conclusion
• References

Most failures happen at handovers between teams, and the person who keeps those handovers working is usually described in her review as doing her job.

The symptom: the handovers that never fail

A quality specialist in a manufacturing company spends most of a day each week on work that belongs to nobody. Production asks her what a customer complaint actually means. Sales asks her whether a promised change is technically possible. Service asks her who in engineering can answer a question before Friday. She translates, connects and occasionally sets up the call herself. Her objectives list her own team’s deliverables, and at the annual review she is rated as meeting expectations.

When she leaves for another company, nothing breaks at once. Over the following quarter three handovers between production and service slow down, a customer issue takes twice as long to close, and a sales commitment turns out to be undeliverable. Nobody connects any of this to her departure, because nothing in the company’s systems ever recorded what she was doing.
This is a different problem from the one we described in our article on reorganisation, where a new structure removes connections nobody had mapped. Here the connections exist and work well. What is missing is any system that counts the work that keeps them working.

Our first study, How Innovation Happens, is based on 28 in-depth interviews with innovation leaders in large Nordic and European organisations. One of its central findings is that innovation succeeds or fails at transitions: between teams, functions and units, more than inside them. This article looks at the work done at those transitions and at why organisations so rarely see it.

The usual explanation, and why it does not hold

The usual explanation is that some people are simply helpful. Cross-team work is treated as good citizenship, a sign of seniority or a matter of personality. It is appreciated and occasionally thanked, and it is assumed to look after itself.

The research literature already contains a clue about why this is not enough. Dennis Organ’s 1988 definition of organisational citizenship behaviour describes it as discretionary behaviour that is not directly or explicitly recognised by the formal reward system, and that helps the organisation function. The definition itself records the gap: the behaviour is valued precisely because it falls outside what the system counts.

Our findings make the gap more specific. Section 8.1 of the report names conditions that recur across all stages of the innovation flow, and two of them meet here. Legitimacy: people engage when innovation-related actions are recognised as real work, rather than extra work or informal personal initiative. Connectivity: most failures occur at handovers between teams, functions or units.

Put those two findings side by side and the problem becomes clear. The work that prevents failures where they most often happen is the work most likely to be classified as extra. One respondent described the result in a single sentence.

“People are very good at their own roles, but innovation usually sits between functions — and that space is not owned by anyone”
People & Business Developer · Financial Services · Finland

Helpfulness explains why one person does this work. It does not explain why the organisation depends on her doing it and keeps no record of it.

What keeps it invisible: four mechanisms

Objectives follow reporting lines. Objectives, budgets and reviews are drawn along the organisation chart, and the chart shows who reports to whom. Section 7.4.3 of the report describes the consequence: business units are measured on delivery and KPIs, leaving no shared accountability at the interface between them. Steven Kerr’s 1975 paper on rewarding A while hoping for B describes the general pattern. An organisation that hopes for collaboration across units and rewards delivery within them gets mostly the second.

The work is informal by design. Much of what happens between teams is fast precisely because it skips the formal route.

“A lot of alignment happens through direct chats between people in different units. It’s often faster and more effective than formal meetings”
Banking Innovation Lead · Financial Software & Banking · Sweden

“Experts across different functions and countries are connected through internal forums and communities, where they share experiences and solutions related to products and processes. This is not a separate innovation activity, but part of how people do their work”
Innovation & Development Lead · Industrial Manufacturing · Finland

The informality is what makes the work efficient, and it is also what makes it invisible. A direct chat leaves no trace in a project plan. Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi (1995) call the sharing of tacit knowledge through direct contact socialisation, and of all the modes of knowledge transfer they describe, it is the one that leaves the least written record.

Knowledge travels, responsibility stays put. Section 7.4.3 of the report puts it plainly: silos are not resolved by communication alone, because knowledge may flow across units while responsibility and decision-making do not. The person in the middle carries the knowledge across and then waits for someone on the other side to decide. Wesley Cohen and Daniel Levinthal’s work on absorptive capacity (1990) describes the role such people play: an organisation takes in knowledge partly through individuals who stand at its internal and external boundaries and translate what they find into terms the receiving unit can use.

The work is concentrated in a few people. Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant, drawing on research in more than 300 organisations, report that in most cases 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees (2016). Uncounted cross-team work is therefore rarely spread evenly. It sits with a handful of people, and the departure of one of them is a structural event, even when it is recorded as an ordinary resignation.

Table 1. Where cross-team work appears in organisational systems, and where it does not. Analysis based on Bridgium, How Innovation Happens (2026), sections 7.3, 7.4.1 and 7.4.3.

Two classic network studies explain why this work matters more than its visibility suggests. Mark Granovetter (1973) showed that weak ties, the looser connections between otherwise separate groups, are the ones that carry new information, because close contacts tend to know what we already know. Ronald Burt (1992) described the gaps between groups as structural holes and showed that people who bridge them have access to information others lack. The quality specialist in our example was doing exactly this. The organisation benefited from her position without knowing she held it.

Where this sits in the framework

In the Innovation Flow framework, connectivity is the condition that lets ideas travel across organisational boundaries. The report describes how organisations meet it through different forms of horizontal collaboration at each stage of the flow, and Appendix 3 documents three recurring forms.

Table 2. Three forms of horizontal collaboration. Source: Bridgium, How Innovation Happens (2026), Appendix 3.

The appendix adds a point that is easy to miss. These structures also act as containers of innovation memory, retaining learning from discussions, pilots and iterations so that ideas remain visible and can return for further development. When the work between teams is done by individuals rather than by recognised forums, the memory sits in those individuals and leaves with them.

Section 7.3 shows what a recognised forum adds beyond speed. Communication across units also works as a feedback loop, carrying back what happened when a solution was used somewhere else.

“When a solution is shared through the community and used in another location, people often come back with improvements or variations based on their context”
Group Vice President · Industrial Automation · Finland

A forum that many people attend brings those improvements back to everyone who uses the solution. A single person who connects two teams brings them back only to the two teams she happens to connect, and only for as long as she is there to do it.

At the third stage, the report’s own list of enablers for making ideas stick includes both horizontal communication across departments and countries and recognition of contributions during adoption. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s term for this stage is internalization: a practice becomes routine through repetition until it no longer needs to be managed. In large organisations, much of that repetition crosses team boundaries, and it crosses them through people.

How to check this in your own organisation

Five questions show quickly how much of your organisation’s cross-team work goes uncounted:

1. If you asked three teams who they go to when a handover with another team is stuck, would they name the same people?
2. Do any of those people have this work in their written objectives?
3. When one of them last left or changed role, did anyone look at which handovers slowed down in the following quarter?
4. Is there a forum where people from different units meet regularly, or does all of the alignment happen in direct chats?
5. Can a colleague in another team recognise someone’s help in a way their manager will see?

Table 3. Signals that cross-team work goes uncounted. Source: derived from Bridgium, How Innovation Happens (2026), sections 7.3 and 7.4.

The Nordic dimension

Nordic organisations have a real advantage here, and the interviews show it. Respondents from Finland and Sweden describe cross-unit exchange as embedded in everyday work, through direct chats, internal forums and communities, rather than as a separate activity that needs permission. Flat structures make it easy to approach someone in another unit without going through two managers first.

The same ease carries a risk. Our reading of the data, which goes beyond what the report states directly, is that the more normal and informal cross-team help becomes, the less likely anyone is to record it. Where it takes a formal request to get help from another department, the help at least leaves a trace. Where it takes a message in a chat, it leaves none. Add the report’s own finding that decisions stay within units even where knowledge moves freely, and the result is an organisation that is very good at sharing information across its boundaries and much weaker at sharing responsibility across them.

The structural response

1. Name the forums that already exist. Most organisations already have communities, expert networks or recurring cross-unit meetings. Appendix 3 describes them as repeatable environments rather than one-off meetings. Give them an owner, protected time and a place in the calendar, so that the connection does not depend on one person’s goodwill.
2. Write cross-team contribution into the objectives of the roles that depend on it. If a role exists partly to make handovers work, its objectives can say so. This turns the work from extra effort into expected work, which is what section 8.1 of the report describes as legitimacy.
3. Let recognition cross team lines. The report lists recognition of contributions during adoption among the enablers at the third stage, and section 5.2.3 describes recognition as what sustains effort beyond the first attempt. Recognition that a colleague in another team can give, and a manager can see, makes the work visible where it actually happens.
4. Put a decision-holder at the interface. Section 7.4.3 shows that knowledge crosses boundaries more easily than responsibility. For the handovers that matter, name who decides on the receiving side, so that the person who carries knowledge across is not left carrying the decision as well.

Conclusion

The work between teams is where most handovers succeed or fail, and it is also the work least likely to appear in any record. That is a matter of design. Organisational systems are built along reporting lines, and this work runs across them.

The cost appears late and in disguise: a slower quarter after a resignation, a customer issue that bounces between departments, a commitment one unit made that another cannot keep. Each looks like an operational problem, and few are traced back to a connection that nobody had counted.

Counting this work does not need a new system. It needs the existing ones to look sideways as well as down, through objectives that include the interface, forums that hold the connection and recognition that can cross a team boundary. One question is worth asking this week: if the person your teams rely on between them left tomorrow, how long would it take anyone to notice?

The full Innovation Flow framework, including the enablers for each stage, is set out in How Innovation Happens. You can download the report at bridgium-research.eu/innovation-report-2026

References

1. Bridgium (2026). How Innovation Happens: Insights from Leading Enterprises in Times of Change.
2. Organ, D. W. (1988). Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Good Soldier Syndrome. Lexington Books. Print edition;
3. Kerr, S. (1975). On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B. Academy of Management Journal, 18(4), 769–783.
4. Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company. Oxford University Press.
5. Cohen, W. M. and Levinthal, D. A. (1990). Absorptive capacity: A new perspective on learning and innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35(1), 128–152.
6. Cross, R., Rebele, R. and Grant, A. (2016). Collaborative overload. Harvard Business Review, January–February 2016.
7. Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.
8. Burt, R. S. (1992). Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Harvard University Press.
9. Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality.