What is handoff communication failures?

Handoff communication failures is a concept in personal epistemology: 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.

This concept is part of Phase 41 (Workflow Design) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for workflow design.