A team sees what it is paid to see.
Carsten Christiani
When something in your company keeps getting missed, the first question is rarely who is careless. It is what the people closest to it are paid to see, and I mean paid in the wide sense: what they are measured on, and what gets praised in the Monday meeting. A team sees what it is paid to see, and sees it very well. Everything else drifts out of view surprisingly fast, however good everyone's intentions are.
A measure works like a head torch. Whatever it points at is bright and sharp, and the brighter the beam, the darker everything around it looks. Put two people with head torches in a dark room, each looking carefully at their own work, and the thing that trips them both up will be lying on the floor between them.
That's where a lot of things go missing in a company: between two teams, each with a clear measure, each doing its job properly. A very common version of this pattern runs between marketing and sales. Marketing is measured on enquiries, so it sees enquiries and gets good at producing them. Sales is measured on deals won, so it sees deals. Whether those enquiries ever turned into business belongs to neither number, so it sits in the dark between the two beams, and the argument about lead quality can run for years until somebody joins the two sets of figures up.
Nobody in that picture is doing anything wrong, which is what makes it hard to fix by talking to people. If you replaced everyone involved, I'd expect the new people to see what the old ones saw, because the torch comes with the job. It also goes some way to explaining something most companies feel and can't quite put a finger on, which is why customers keep saying things the company never seems to hear. What a customer says rarely arrives in the shape of anybody's measure. It gets noticed by whoever happened to be on the call, sensed more than measured, and then it has nowhere to go.
That's the slow version of the problem. Companies get very good at what can be measured and gradually lose contact with what can only be sensed, and they don't notice, because the measures keep improving. There's no conspiracy in it; the arrangement simply rewards other things.
AI makes this sharper, and quicker. An AI agent sees only what it is told to count. Give a marketing agent cheap leads and clicks as its target, with no line back to what sales actually won, and it will become extremely good at cheap leads and clicks. It is doing exactly what it was asked, faster than any team could, and the dark patch between the beams grows while every dashboard goes green.
The same is true of anyone you hire from outside, us included. What a firm is paid for shapes what it can see. If it bills by the hour, it has no reason to hurry, and if it lives on a retainer, it has every reason to keep finding problems. We built our own deal the other way round: a fixed price for a defined result, with no hourly billing and no retainer, and the result includes your people running the thing without us. The one question that arrangement forces us to look at is whether it keeps working after we've gone. It doesn't make us immune. It gives us different blind spots, and it's fair to ask any adviser, us too, which ones theirs are.
On Monday, take the thing in your company that keeps falling through. Write down the team measured on the step just before it and the team measured on the step just after it. Then pull last month's figures for both and check whether either number moved when it went wrong. If neither did, you've found where it lives, and you've also found why nobody has fixed it. The repair starts with one measure that reaches across the gap and that both teams see every month. In the marketing and sales version, that is the share of enquiries that became business, reported to both teams on the same page. Then comes the harder conversation, about who owns the dark bit in the middle.
Somebody might be careless, of course. Check the torches first.