The moment
A referral for special education services stalls for six weeks. No single department is dysfunctional. The evaluation team, the scheduling office, and the transportation office each did their job correctly in isolation. Nobody owned making those three correct actions work together in time, and the family experiences six weeks of delay that no individual department would recognize as their fault.
The core claim
This is the model under everything in this tier, stated directly. Organizations succeed or struggle based on the quality of interactions between departments, not the strength of individual departments in isolation. A department can hit every internal metric it’s measured on and still contribute to a systemic failure, because its metrics were never designed to capture what happens at its boundaries with everyone else.
