In a relay race, the baton spends a fraction of the race changing hands, and that fraction decides the result. Work is no different. Most of the damage between teams happens not inside functions but at the hand-offs between them: work lobbed over a boundary with no view of what the receiver is carrying. Drawing on what we watch happen inside our one-day business simulations, this piece looks at why we throw the baton instead of passing it, why the receiver’s constraints are the whole game, and how much faster the same people run when the exchange is treated as part of the race.
The race is won in the exchange
At the Rio Olympics in 2016, Japan took silver in the men’s 4x100m relay in 37.60 seconds, an Asian record, and not one of their four sprinters had ever run 100 metres in under ten seconds. The United States, who could field faster individuals in every leg, crossed the line in the same final and were disqualified: the baton was passed outside the exchange zone, their ninth failed relay campaign at a major championships since 1995.
Japan’s edge wasn’t leg speed. It was two decades of obsessive attention to the exchange itself: an unusual underhand pass, biomechanical analysis, months of drilling in training camps before the final four were even chosen. The arithmetic of a relay makes the point brutally: three of the four runners receive the baton at full speed, so a good team’s time beats the sum of its individual bests, but only if the baton never slows down. Japan gained more than a second on their rivals purely in the exchanges. Which leaves an uncomfortable conclusion for anyone building a team: the four fastest runners are not the fastest team. The team’s speed lives in the exchanges.
Most teams throw the baton
You’ll recognise what throwing the baton looks like at work. The ticket dropped into another team’s queue at five o’clock. The spec handed over without the reasoning behind it. The campaign that sales first hears about from a customer. “I’ve sent it over” quietly standing in for “it’s handled.” Each leg run well; the race lost between them.
We didn’t invent the phrase. A senior leadership team in one of our recent simulation sessions, watching the replay of their own day, described their real-world hand-offs as “chucking the baton over rather than handing it”, and mapped the cost straight onto their organisation. It’s the same pattern we unpack in organisational silos: why they form and what actually breaks them: silo thinking is what grows when information, decisions and goals stop crossing the boundary between functions, and nobody builds it on purpose. When your targets stop at the edge of your team, “done my bit” is entirely rational. That piece covers why the walls build themselves; this one is about the yard of track where they do their damage.
The receiver’s constraints are the whole game
Watch a 4x100m exchange closely and something surprising emerges: almost every detail of it is one runner adjusting to the reality of the other. The outgoing runner never looks back. They launch off a mark on the track, and the mark is calibrated not to their own pace but to the incoming runner’s: a tired athlete decelerating at the end of a flat-out hundred. The incoming runner, in turn, holds their line, makes the call, and places the baton where the receiving hand will be, not where it’s convenient to let go. Neither passes on their own terms.
Now compare the typical hand-off at work. We pass as if the receiver were standing still: unlimited capacity, an empty queue, fully briefed, working to the same definition of done. Their lead times, their half-finished commitments, the information they don’t have (their constraints, in a word) are invisible to us, so they never figure in the pass.
We watch this play out almost every time we run TeamWork.Inc. In early rounds, facilitators consistently record functions acting independently with little visibility of the constraints the others are working to; the people saying yes to work never check with the people who have to deliver it. Work doesn’t fail inside functions; it stalls in the space between them. And the recovery, when it comes, is always the same and always simple to say: constraints surfaced before decisions, not after. “Are we capable of delivering this?” starts beating “can we win this work?”
What changes when the baton is passed properly
The session above put numbers on it. The same fourteen people who ended their first trading round roughly $390,000 down (delivery running at 30% of capacity, work piling up between functions) closed their final round $277,000 in profit, with utilisation at 72% and ten of eleven orders delivered. Nobody ran their own leg faster. They fixed the exchanges. Exactly like Japan in Rio: no new runners between the heats and the final; the second they gained lived entirely in the hand-offs. The case studies show how that translates in the months that follow.
How to pass, not throw
- Redefine “done” as “received”. An exchange ends when the receiver has grip, not when the baton leaves your hand. At work that means confirmed, understood and accepted into someone’s plan, not sent.
- Learn the other runner’s mark. Before committing work across a boundary, ask what the receiving team is carrying (capacity, lead times, competing commitments) and calibrate the pass to their speed, not yours. Constraints before decisions, every time.
- Pass the context, not just the object. The baton is the easy part. The decisions already made, the assumptions baked in, the questions still open: a spec without its reasoning is a thrown baton, however neatly it lands.
- Run the overlap. In the exchange zone, both runners are moving together at speed. Build the equivalent: a deliberate stretch where giver and receiver work side by side (days, not a meeting) instead of a hard cutover and a wave.
- Practise the exchange when nothing is at stake. Japan drilled baton work for months before Rio; most organisations never rehearse a hand-off at all. Give a team one day in an environment where the walls demonstrably cause failure and mistakes are free, then debrief it against the real thing. That rehearsal is what TeamWork.Inc was built for.
Frequently asked questions
What does “throwing the baton” mean at work?
It’s a hand-off treated as finished the moment work leaves your hands: passed across a team boundary without checking the receiver’s capacity, context or definition of done. It’s silo thinking made visible at the point of transfer: each function runs its own leg well while the race is lost in between.
Why do hand-offs between teams fail?
Because they’re calibrated to the giver’s convenience rather than the receiver’s constraints. When each team’s targets stop at its own boundary, nobody is rewarded for the quality of the exchange, so lead times, capacity and missing context stay invisible until the work stalls. The causes are the same five forces that build organisational silos in the first place.
How do you improve hand-offs between departments?
Redefine done as received, surface the receiving team’s constraints before decisions are made, pass the context along with the work, build an overlap into every transfer, and rehearse the pattern somewhere safe before betting live work on it.
Immersive Edge runs one-day business simulations that let teams watch their own hand-offs, and fix them, before dinner. If work is stalling between your teams rather than moving through them, talk to us or explore the case studies.