The Conductor’s Journal | Rhythm · 2 of 5 | The Handoff That Never Lands

The Conductor’s Journal | Rhythm · 2 of 5

The Handoff That Never Lands

You say it in the morning huddle.

You type it into the team chat.

You write it on the patient’s whiteboard.

An hour later, a specialist walks into the room, turns to you, and asks the very question you have already answered three times.

Your first instinct is frustration.

Didn’t they listen? Don’t they read the notes?

It feels like a personal failure—either your memory, or theirs.

But this isn’t a memory problem.

It’s a rhythm problem.

“The handoff that never lands isn’t a failure of people. It’s a failure of timing.”

This is the handoff that never lands. The information you shared is real, but it’s in the air. It existed in the moment you spoke it—but not in the system your colleague is looking at.

Your verbal handoff at 8 AM and their question at 11 AM are out of sync. The information wasn’t where they needed it, when they needed it. So, you repeat yourself.

This act of repetition is the human patch for a system gap.

You are manually bridging the space between two different moments, two different workflows, two different clocks. You’re carrying the information forward in time, using your own energy and voice to keep it from decaying.

In a smooth, flowing system, information moves like a baton in a relay race. It’s passed cleanly, in rhythm, right at the moment of need. There’s no fumbling, no dropping, no stopping to turn around and shout, “Wait, you forgot this!”

“Every repetition is a person doing what the system forgot to do—keep time.”

In most workplaces, that handoff is a fumble. We throw the baton in the general direction of the next person, but the system doesn’t have a hand ready to catch it. The ground for it to land on—the chart, the shared task list, the bedside record—is in another room, on another device, or structured in a way that buries the one critical piece of information.

The handoff that never lands isn’t a failure of people.

It’s a failure of timing.

It’s a sign that your team’s now and your system’s now are two different things.

And all that repetition? That’s the sound of your team trying, with their own effort, to get them back in sync.

In the last 24 hours, how many times did you have to repeat the same critical piece of information—and what gap were you really bridging each time you did?

“Repetition is a symptom of rhythm drift.”

 

Continuo. Where care performs in time.