Some problems appear between responsibilities.

When something gets stuck between teams, one of the first questions is usually who owns it. Maybe a responsibility wasn't clear. Maybe someone thought another team was handling it. Maybe something simply didn't have an owner.

But sometimes ownership isn't the problem. Everyone knows what belongs to them. One team finishes its part. Another does the same. Nobody is waiting for someone else to do their job. And still, something doesn't quite work.

A customer moves from one team to another and has to explain the same problem again. A decision made in one part of the organization creates work somewhere else that nobody expected. Something reaches the next team technically complete, but without what they need to continue. Nobody necessarily missed a step.

We create clarity by dividing work. This belongs to one team. That belongs to another. Each responsibility has a name next to it. That clarity matters. Without it, people spend too much time working out who is supposed to do what.

But the work itself doesn't stop at the same boundaries.

A customer experience continues across teams. A decision keeps having consequences after it leaves the person who made it. Information that makes sense in one context may need something different when it reaches another.

Every part can work as expected without the whole thing working particularly well. And that can make the problem harder to see.

When responsibilities are clear, we tend to look within them for what went wrong. But some problems don't quite belong to one team or another.

Sometimes the gap is exactly where one responsibility ends and another begins.