Being surprised by work you should have seen coming

In the free-text comments of a large engagement survey, one complaint came up more than almost any other, and it was not about workload or managers. It was about being pulled into work at the last minute and surprised by it.

That is what ineffective communication between teams actually looks like from the inside. Not silence. Surprise. The work is coordinated and the information is not, so people find out about decisions at the point where their only remaining options are expensive.

This is the third of four failure modes. The argument underneath them is here.

Why "communicate more" makes it worse

The instinct is to add a channel. A newsletter, a shared inbox, a standing all-hands, a Slack channel for the initiative. Six months later there are four places to look and people check none of them, which is how you end up with more communication and less awareness.

The fix is almost never volume. It is three specific things, and they correspond to three distinct complaints.

"We find out too late"

Put the work in one place both teams can see. Roles, responsibilities, status, and what is coming. One workspace everybody can see into. The test is whether somebody on the other team can answer "what are they working on" without asking anybody.

Agree the channel for each kind of message. Sit down with the other team and decide what gets an email, what gets a chat, what needs a meeting, and what goes in the shared workspace. Most missed information was communicated, in a place the recipient does not watch.

Run cross-team showcases. A recurring session where each team walks through what it is working on and takes questions from the other. This is the single highest-yield item on this page, because it surfaces overlaps nobody knew to ask about. It is also the first thing canceled when calendars get tight, because prevention never looks urgent.

And ask. If you need to know something, go and get it. Waiting to be told is a choice, and it is one people make while feeling wronged about the outcome.

"They make decisions without involving us"

Get on their calendar. Join their recurring call if it makes sense. If it does not, set a short standing touchpoint with one peer on that team. Fifteen minutes a fortnight with the right person beats any distribution list.

Make the ripple effects visible. Nobody can anticipate an impact they have never been shown. Take one concrete example of their work landing badly on yours, walk them through the mechanism, and ask to be consulted on that class of decision in future. A specific example changes behavior. A general request to be kept informed does not.

Agree which changes trigger a conversation. Define the categories, then follow the process yourself before you ask them to.

Go first. Bring somebody from the other team into a decision your team is making, before you have any need from them. Being included turns out to be mostly a function of including, and the sequence matters more than people expect.

"Their demands are unreasonable"

This one usually arrives with real frustration attached, and it responds to structure rather than to a conversation about respect.

Renegotiate the service level. Reset what you will deliver and by when. If what you can offer genuinely falls short of what they need, take it to the shared priorities and to senior leadership together, as a joint problem rather than a complaint about them.

Stay close enough to see it coming. Regular contact with a peer tells you what is about to land and what their capacity actually is. Most unreasonable requests are reasonable requests that arrived without warning.

Create margin. Find the low-value work your team can stop or automate. A team running at full capacity experiences every unplanned request as an imposition, and no amount of goodwill changes that arithmetic.

Back your team. Let them handle what they can. Take the hard conversation to your counterpart yourself rather than leaving one of your people to negotiate upward across a boundary.

How you know it worked

One question, asked of your own team, thirty days later: when was the last time you were surprised by something another team did?

If the answer has moved from "this week" to "I cannot remember," the channel work landed. If people are still being surprised but now say they saw it in the shared workspace and did not register it, you have an attention problem rather than an information problem, and that is a different fix.

The exercise

For the next two weeks, keep a note every time your team is surprised by something another team did.

At the end, sort the list into two piles: things you could not have known, and things that were available somewhere you were not looking.

The second pile is usually larger than people expect. It is also the one you can fix this month.