Every handover in a project loses information, adds delay and pulls people away from the big picture. The answer is not better handovers. It is fewer people, closer together.
There is a rarely discussed hurdle on any innovation journey: the destructive game of broken telephone that quietly accompanies most projects. One person whispers a message to the next, who repeats what they think they heard to the next. By the end of the chain, the message rarely resembles the original.
Now picture an innovation project set up to succeed. The team is configured well, ownership is clear, the direction has been set. And yet within months you are frustrated by the lack of progress. Iterations are being spent correcting misunderstandings rather than applying what has been learned. Coordinating the activity is swallowing the effort. If that sounds familiar, you have probably met the project version of broken telephone.
A client example
A client engaged their marketing agency to help develop an innovation project. The client dealt with the account director. The account director engaged an account manager to run the work. The account manager parcelled tasks out to a graphic designer, a web designer and a copywriter, who were also overseen by a creative director.
The process wasn’t working for me. I kept having to repeat myself, the work I received back didn’t reflect the conversations I’d been having, and there were long delays between iterations. The ideas coming back simply weren’t aligned.
The client, in their own words
Count the handovers in that structure and the frustration explains itself. Every briefing and every update introduced waste, and the waste comes in three forms.
Waste one: information is lost at every step
The idea that information degrades in a relay is old mathematics: Claude Shannon modelled it in the 1940s, and his work still sits at the heart of image and video compression. It shows up just as reliably in daily work. One study of verbal handovers in nursing found the message effectively gone after three cycles; even with notes taken, most of it was lost after five.
Waste two: every handover adds delay
A handover has to be arranged, carried out and written up, between people whose calendars are already full. Assume at least a day for each one. And while it waits, part of the team waits with it.
Waste three: every handover shrinks the big picture
New projects need constant conversation between the business idea and the solution design; in Clarkson’s law we argue the two are siblings. Push them three handovers apart and that conversation stops. People become task-driven, working to the next review rather than staying invested in the whole.
The minimum viable team
Amazon’s two-pizza rule says no meeting should be bigger than two pizzas can feed. Apply the same discipline to the team itself. The minimum viable team is the smallest group that can deliver the project in the time available, with the fewest handovers inside it. When building something new, a few people with broad skills usually beat a larger cast of narrow specialists; the specialists can be called on without living in the team.
Teams bloat for predictable reasons: politics, change-management cover, and a quiet lack of confidence in the team’s competence. Resist all three. We have watched very small teams be devastatingly effective, including inside large organisations.
AI has raised the stakes
Since we first wrote this, AI has changed the arithmetic. A small senior team working with AI tools now moves at a pace a large, layered team cannot match, because AI compresses the doing while handovers still tax the deciding. Every briefing document and every relay through an account layer now wastes not only information, but the speed the tools have granted.
It is why we deliver the way we do: senior people who stay on the work from first conversation to launch, no hand-offs, and AI doing the heavy lifting it is genuinely good at. The minimum viable team was always the efficient choice. It is now the fast one too.
The point
The simple way to avoid the destructive nature of handovers is not to have them: build the smallest possible team around the idea, and let them work closely with open communication.
There is a famous story about Andy Rubin pitching Android to Samsung in 2004. At the end of the pitch, one of the executives is said to have asked: “You and what army are going to go and create this? You have six people. Are you high?” Six people were enough. They usually are.
