Nobody Owned the Between
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Primary topic: Hidden coordination work created between formally assigned responsibilities in organisations
Central question: Why does additional work emerge even when individual tasks and responsibilities appear to be clearly allocated?
Key concepts: organisational design, coordination, role clarity, handovers, workflow, responsibility, hidden work, process ownership
Core insight: Organisations can define responsibility for individual tasks precisely while leaving the intervals between those responsibilities structurally unowned, creating hidden coordination work that must be performed before the next formal task can begin.
Summary
Organisations usually allocate responsibility by assigning tasks, roles and process stages. Yet much of the coordination burden of work arises not inside these defined units but between them. Information has to be clarified, incomplete outputs interpreted, timing aligned and exceptions negotiated before the next formally responsible person can proceed. Struction describes this as Interval Work: work created because responsibility for adjacent tasks has been defined while responsibility for the transition between them has not. The resulting effort is easily misread as communication overhead or individual inefficiency, although its source lies in organisational design.
When Every Task Had an Owner
Many organisations could produce remarkably precise answers when asked who was responsible for a particular activity. Sales prepared the offer, procurement placed the order, finance approved the payment, operations delivered the service, HR completed the employment process and management made the final decision. Digital workflow systems reinforced this clarity by assigning tasks to named individuals, departments or queues. At almost every visible stage, somebody appeared to own the work.
Yet employees frequently encountered another reality. The output from one stage was technically complete but could not immediately be used by the next. Information was missing, terminology differed, assumptions had not travelled with the document, timing was unclear or an exceptional case fitted neither role particularly well. Someone then had to make a call, send a message, interpret an ambiguous field, reconstruct a previous decision or determine who should act next.
This additional activity rarely appeared in the formal process description because it belonged neither completely to the preceding task nor completely to the following one. Both formal responsibilities could have been fulfilled correctly, yet work was still required before the process could continue.
Struction later identified this as a separate organisational phenomenon: Interval Work.
Interval Work describes the additional coordination, interpretation and clarification required in the space between two formally defined responsibilities when the transition itself has no equally clear owner.
The distinction matters because an organisation can possess high role clarity at the task level while remaining structurally ambiguous between tasks.
Responsibility Had Been Designed as Territory
Traditional organisational design often treated responsibility as a division of territory. One role owned a particular activity until a defined output had been produced; another role became responsible once that output entered the next stage. This model appeared logical because it prevented duplication and made accountability easier to establish.
The difficulty lay in the boundary itself. The end of one responsibility and the beginning of another did not always coincide as precisely as the process diagram suggested. A completed document could still require explanation. An approved decision might need translation into operational consequences. A customer case could leave one department formally while remaining insufficiently prepared for the next. A technical change might be implemented correctly but require surrounding teams to adjust their routines.
The organisational chart could therefore show two adjacent responsibilities while the actual workflow contained a third requirement between them: someone had to make the transition work.
That requirement was easy to overlook because it often produced no independent deliverable. The employee who clarified a misunderstanding, chased missing information or explained why an unusual case differed from the standard process had not necessarily created something the organisation counted as output. They had enabled another piece of recognised work to begin.
The work was real, but its organisational visibility was weak.
Why the Interval Disappeared From Process Maps
Process maps reinforced this invisibility. They usually represented work through boxes connected by arrows. The boxes contained activities, decisions or responsibilities; the arrows indicated movement between them. Visually, the transition appeared almost costless. One stage ended, the arrow crossed a small distance and the next stage began.
In actual organisations, the arrow could contain substantial work.
A handover might require contextual explanation. Data could need reconciliation because two systems represented the same customer differently. An incoming request might have to be interpreted before anyone knew which process applied. A decision made at management level could require several conversations before its operational meaning became sufficiently clear for implementation.
The graphical language of process design unintentionally encouraged organisations to think of transitions as movement rather than work. What happened inside the boxes received names, owners and performance indicators. What happened along the arrows often remained a presumed property of coordination.
This created a structural blind spot. Organisations became increasingly sophisticated at optimising individual process stages while underestimating the work required to connect them.
The later Struction reconstruction therefore treated the arrow differently. An arrow between two tasks was not evidence that a transition existed successfully. It was a claim that one had been designed.
Whether the transition actually worked remained an empirical question.
The Difference Between Handover and Interval
Interval Work overlaps with handover problems but is not identical to them. A handover usually describes the transfer of information, responsibility or material from one actor to another. Interval Work begins where the formal handover itself is insufficient to make the receiving stage operationally ready.
An employee may receive all required documents and still need to determine what they mean in this particular case. A team may be informed of a management decision but still need to translate it into changed priorities. A customer request may have been transferred correctly while containing an ambiguity that neither the sending nor receiving role is formally expected to resolve.
The handover has occurred.
The next task cannot yet begin cleanly.
This distinction helps explain why organisations sometimes respond to coordination problems by introducing more detailed handover rules without substantially reducing the burden. The problem may not be that information failed to cross the boundary. The problem may be that the boundary itself requires judgement.
When such judgement is recurrent but remains formally unassigned, Interval Work becomes a permanent layer of the operating model.
The People Who Became Bridges
Organisations rarely leave structural gaps completely unresolved. People compensate for them. Experienced employees learn whom to call, which information is usually missing, how another department interprets particular terms and which exceptions require informal coordination. Over time, some individuals become unusually effective at connecting parts of the organisation.
These employees are often described as collaborative, experienced, pragmatic or simply indispensable. The descriptions may be entirely accurate, but they can conceal what the organisation is actually depending upon. A person may appear exceptionally valuable partly because they have accumulated knowledge about how to cross boundaries that the formal structure itself does not reliably manage.
The organisation then acquires a human bridge.
Human bridges can be highly effective. They resolve ambiguity quickly, preserve context and adapt to exceptional situations more flexibly than a rigid procedure could. The structural risk appears when the organisation begins treating their compensatory capability as a normal property of the process.
A workflow that functions because one experienced employee knows how to repair every transition can appear stable for years. The fragility becomes visible only when that person is absent, changes role or leaves the organisation.
What appeared to be individual expertise was partly carrying unowned structure.
When Communication Volume Was a Symptom
This perspective also changes the interpretation of communication overload. Organisations frequently experience large volumes of internal messages, short calls, clarification meetings and follow-up questions. The conventional response is often to improve communication discipline: fewer emails, clearer messages, better meeting practices or more appropriate use of collaboration tools.
Such measures can be useful, but they assume that communication volume originates primarily in communication behaviour.
Interval Work suggests another possibility. Some communication exists because organisational boundaries repeatedly generate questions that cannot be resolved inside either adjacent role. Employees communicate because the structure requires them to negotiate the transition.
A message asking whether a case is ready to proceed may therefore not represent unnecessary communication. It may be the mechanism through which the organisation determines a status its formal process failed to establish. A short meeting between two departments may not exist because people enjoy meetings; it may repeatedly reconstruct a shared understanding that the workflow itself does not preserve.
In such situations, reducing communication without examining its structural cause can remove compensation while leaving the gap intact.
The more useful question is not simply why people communicate so much, but what uncertainty would remain unresolved if they stopped.
The Hidden Cost of Clean Accountability
There was another paradox. Efforts to improve accountability could sometimes increase Interval Work. The more precisely organisations defined where one responsibility ended, the easier it became for ambiguous matters to fall between roles.
Clear accountability is generally valuable. Problems arise only when responsibility is defined as exclusion rather than continuity. If Role A is accountable until a particular output is produced and Role B only after that output meets specified conditions, someone must still own situations in which the output exists but those conditions remain uncertain.
Formal clarity can therefore coexist with operational ambiguity.
This was especially visible in exception handling. Standard cases travelled smoothly because the process had been designed around them. Unusual cases exposed the boundaries. Each department could correctly state that a particular question did not belong to its formal remit, while the organisation as a whole still needed someone to answer it.
The phrase not my responsibility was therefore not always evidence of poor culture. Sometimes it was an accurate description of a structural omission.
The organisation had defined the territories correctly.
It had forgotten to govern the border.
Why Automation Could Make the Gap More Visible
Digital workflow and automation did not automatically eliminate Interval Work. In some cases, they exposed it more clearly. Software could enforce defined sequences extremely well: once condition A was fulfilled, the case moved to stage B; when approval was recorded, the next task appeared automatically.
This worked efficiently when reality matched the designed states. Difficulty arose when a case occupied an intermediate condition the system had not represented. Human workers then had to interpret the exception outside the formal workflow, perhaps through email, messaging or manual notes.
Automation could therefore produce an interesting inversion. Standard work became increasingly invisible because systems performed transitions automatically, while the remaining human work concentrated around ambiguity, exceptions and interpretation.
The formal process looked more efficient, yet the human work became structurally denser.
This mattered because organisations sometimes evaluated automation by the volume of manual steps removed without examining the composition of the work that remained. Ten simple transfers might disappear while three difficult boundary decisions stayed with employees.
The quantity of work had fallen.
Its coordination intensity had increased.
Interval Work as an Organisational Diagnostic Signal
From a Struction perspective, recurrent Interval Work should therefore not automatically be eliminated. Some boundaries genuinely require human judgement because organisations deal with variable situations that cannot be completely standardised. Attempting to formalise every possible transition would create bureaucracy of another kind.
The diagnostic value lies elsewhere. Recurrent clarification indicates where the formal organisation and the actual flow of work diverge. If the same people repeatedly chase the same missing information, translate the same terminology or negotiate the same boundary, the organisation is receiving evidence about its own design.
The key distinction is between necessary interval work and structurally produced interval work. Necessary Interval Work arises because reality contains genuine ambiguity that requires judgement. Structurally produced Interval Work arises because the organisation repeatedly fails to provide information, decision rights, status definitions or transition ownership that could reasonably be designed.
Without this distinction, both forms appear simply as everyday coordination.
With it, repeated coordination becomes diagnostic information.
The Work Was Not Where the Organisation Was Looking
This also explains why workload analysis can underestimate organisational burden. Formal workload is often associated with the number and complexity of assigned tasks. Yet two employees with similar task volumes can experience very different levels of strain if one operates inside stable transitions while the other constantly has to prepare, repair or interpret the boundaries around their work.
The second employee performs the recognised task plus the work required to make that task structurally possible.
Because Interval Work is fragmented across messages, short conversations, searches, follow-ups and mental reconstruction, it rarely appears as one large additional activity. Its burden is cumulative. Five minutes here, eight minutes there, another question before a case can proceed, another interruption because somebody downstream cannot interpret what arrived.
The organisation may consequently search for productivity problems inside the task while the friction sits around it.
This is one reason Struction distinguishes the sequence of formal activities from the conditions that allow movement between them. A workflow is not stable merely because every stage has an owner. It is stable when each stage can reliably become the starting condition of the next.
The Structural Reconstruction
The conventional image of organisational clarity is a map in which every important activity belongs somewhere. Boxes have names, responsibilities have owners and processes have defined stages. This remains necessary, but it is incomplete.
Work does not occur only inside responsibilities. It also occurs where responsibilities meet.
The interval between two tasks may require interpretation, contextual transfer, exception handling, timing coordination or the reconstruction of information that neither role individually owns. When these requirements remain invisible, employees absorb them as ordinary coordination and organisations misread the resulting workload as communication behaviour, personal inefficiency or unavoidable complexity.
The distinctive Struction proposition is therefore not that responsibilities should become less clear. It is that clarity must extend beyond ownership of tasks to ownership of transitions.
An organisation can allocate every visible task correctly and still leave part of its work structurally homeless.
That homeless work does not disappear. It migrates into messages, meetings, follow-ups, personal experience and the people who become known for somehow knowing how to get things through.
The organisation then appears to function because everyone knows what they are responsible for.
What remains unseen is how much additional work is required because nobody is responsible for the space between those responsibilities.
They had assigned an owner to every task. The work accumulated in the intervals.
Transparency
This article was developed within the framework of the concept The Second Thinking Space with the support of generative artificial intelligence. AI is used to explore questions, broaden perspectives, generate alternative formulations, identify patterns and facilitate the critical examination of ideas and assumptions. The article has been substantively reviewed, editorially revised and approved by the author. All editorial decisions, evaluations, interpretations and conclusions are the sole responsibility of the author.
