About the Event

Your cross-functional work is slow. Projects take longer than they should. Progress is fragilely dependent on key talent. Delays get baked into planning. Performance becomes transactional theatre. Work finishes while initial context is lost. Projects are routinely reworked or fail altogether. We blame technology, one another, or accept it as an inevitable ‘cost of doing business’—and the same cycle keeps happening.

Handoffs—how work transitions between people and teams—are daily opportunities for organizational knowledge, trust, and capacity to compound or evaporate. Poor handoffs are a structural issue with an outsized impact on your organization's ability to adapt, transform, and scale.

In this talk, you’ll learn …

1) The Business Case: How poor handoffs drain resources and structurally condition behaviours that prevent transformation initiatives from succeeding before they’ve begun.

2) Root Diagnostic: Handoffs fail for two underlying reasons: people don't surface problems early, and people don't ask for or offer help, root behaviors that catalyze counterproductive patterns and evaporate the adaptive capacity transformation requires.

3) Structural Diagnostic: Using handoffs as a lens, we'll map 10 structural touchpoints that systematically block problem-surfacing and help-seeking behaviors from taking root and compounding.

4) Refinement Approach: Specific, implementable handoff changes that create immediate operational improvements (faster transitions, fewer errors, less rework) while conditioning the adaptive behaviours transformation requires (surfacing concerns, asking for help).

5) Measurement Framework: How to recognize and measure compounding effects across immediate handoff quality, operational efficiency gains, and adaptive behaviors becoming organizational norms.

6) The Method - Therapeutic Systems Design: Like a therapist diagnosing and rewiring internal patterns, this method discovers behavioral patterns organizations need, maps structural touchpoints inhibiting those behaviors, and redesigns structures to condition desired behaviors at scale. The method applies to any operational system.

7) Getting Started: Engage diagnostic expertise to discover root behavioral patterns through structured interviews. Pilot one critical handoff redesign, measure baseline and improvement, and expand systematically. Avoid: mistaking compliance for behavior change, misdiagnosing symptoms as roots, or attempting behavioral rewiring without relational safety.

This talk is designed for leaders and practitioners working on organizational transformation, cross-functional collaboration, operational excellence, or culture change. If you’ve tried to improve "communication", “break down silos”, and implement learning programs that never stuck, and want to know what to do about it, this talk is for you.

About the Speaker - Graham Hall