What does it mean that handoff points in workflows?

Where one person or system passes work to another is where errors are most likely.

Example: You design a client deliverable through a three-person pipeline: you research and outline, your colleague writes the draft, and a third team member designs the final layout. You send the outline as a bulleted list in Slack. Your colleague writes an excellent draft — but it addresses the wrong audience, because your outline did not specify who the client was targeting. The designer receives the draft with a note saying "make it look good," spends four hours on a landscape-format PDF, and discovers at the last moment that the client needed a portrait-format slide deck. Every handoff lost information. The research was sound. The writing was skilled. The design was polished. The deliverable was wrong — not because anyone failed at their step, but because the transitions between steps had no protocol for preserving context. Two days of rework followed, and the rework was not fixing errors in any individual step. It was reconstructing the information that evaporated at each handoff.

Try this: Choose a workflow that involves at least one handoff — work passing from you to another person, from one tool to another, or from your present self to your future self (a project you set down and pick up later). Map every handoff point in that workflow. For each handoff, answer four questions: (1) What information does the receiving party need to continue without asking clarifying questions? (2) What information is currently being transmitted? (3) What is the gap between those two answers? (4) What is the simplest protocol — a template, a checklist, a standard format — that would close that gap? Implement the protocol for one handoff this week and observe whether it reduces the back-and-forth, rework, or delay that previously occurred at that transition.