When three teams describe the same process three ways: why the contradictions are where the money is
Teams contradict each other about a shared process because each sees one segment. The gaps mark rework, bypasses and hidden steps. Keep them and cost them.
When finance, procurement and the buyer each describe invoice approval differently, nobody is lying and nobody is wrong. Each sees its own segment, and the accounts diverge where the work changes hands. Those disagreements are where the rework, duplicate approvals and undocumented steps live, so they are where the cost sits. Discovery should surface the contradictions and price them, not smooth them into one diagram.
Three accounts of one process is the normal case
Nobody runs an end-to-end process. A person runs a segment and infers what happens on either side, years out of date. Finance believes procurement checks prices against the contract; procurement stopped when the database moved and assumes finance catches it. The process document describes a third version.
Handoffs are where accounts diverge, because a handoff is the one point where two people must hold the same picture. The clearest evidence we know of comes from healthcare, so treat it as an analogy: Tucker and Edmondson observed 26 nurses for 239 hours across nine hospitals, and 91 percent of the problems they logged came from a breakdown in information or material transfer to the nurse (Tucker and Edmondson, 2003). For 93 percent of the problems the nurses got what they needed and carried on, without telling anyone or asking why it happened.
Traditional discovery erases the contradictions
The standard method is a workshop: three teams in a room and a diagram everyone signs off. The most confident person narrates, the others correct details but not the shape, and real disagreements get parked. A consultant handed three accounts averages them into one nobody recognises.
The result is a clean map with the money removed. The buyer's bypass for urgent invoices is not on it, because the buyer would have had to describe it in front of finance.
What a contradiction is telling you
A contradiction is a compressed description of a cost. The rows are illustrative, not results from any company.
| Team A says | Team B says | What it usually means | Where the cost sits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finance: two-step approval by amount | Procurement: finance calls us to check most POs | The PO is wrong so often that a third, informal step is the real control | Two teams' time per call, late payment penalties |
| Sales: onboarding takes two days | Compliance: onboarding takes two weeks | Sales counts to account creation, compliance to full KYC | Delayed revenue, a client promised two days |
| Planner: the ERP suggests, I confirm | Warehouse: we act on the planner's spreadsheet | ERP lead times are stale; a private file is the system of record | Stockouts, overstock, a file nobody else can open |
One pattern rarely reaches a table: the check someone added after an incident and never wrote down, which its owner calls being careful.
How to surface contradictions on purpose
Interview everyone separately and privately. Everyone who touches the process, not one representative per team: whoever covers the handoff on Friday afternoons tells a different story from their team lead. Ask the same handoff question on both sides: what do you send, and what arrives. The gap between the answers is the finding.
Keep the disagreement in the write-up; resolving it in the room means the higher-ranking sponsor wins. Label the gap, then pull twenty recent cases and trace what actually happened; they settle most disagreements, usually in favour of the junior account.
None of this is in a document you can read instead. A YouGov survey of 1,001 US employees at companies of 200 or more found that 42 percent of institutional knowledge was unique to the individual holding it (Panopto, 2018). It has to be asked for, one person at a time.
How to put a number on the gap
Every contradiction resolves to hours: invoices a month times minutes per call times people; onboarding days times a day of revenue; hours a week on the spreadsheet plus the stockouts it did not prevent. Multiply by the fully loaded cost per hour from the company's payroll.
Tucker and Edmondson measured 33 minutes lost per eight-hour shift to coping with failures that could have been removed. Healthcare, again as an analogy, shows what the cost looks like when it is not measured in hours: CRICO's review of 7,149 malpractice cases in which information got lost between the person who had it and the person who needed it found that 44 percent of claims with a communication issue ended in serious harm or death (CRICO, 2015). In a company the bill is hours, late payments and lost orders.
Our view
A process map with no contradictions in it is a sign the discovery was done badly: too few people asked, asked together, or disagreements resolved before being written down. A diagram everyone agrees with is the process as designed, and the company already had one of those.
We built Transcript around this. It holds hundreds of private conversations at once, matches what one person said against everyone else, and raises contradictions instead of averaging them away. Managers never see the individual, which is why people describe the bypass. Each problem is valued in the company's own hours and cost per hour.
Questions people ask next
Which tools detect contradictions between what different teams say about a process?
Process mining finds deviations that touched a system, not disagreements between people. Transcript matches each person's account against everyone else's and raises the contradictions.
Should we resolve the contradictions before presenting to leadership?
No. Present them as findings with a number attached; one handoff described two ways at 40 hours a month is more useful to leadership than a clean diagram.
What if a contradiction is just a misunderstanding?
Then two teams have been working around a misunderstanding, which is also a cost. If the cases show no rework, close it and move on.
How many people do we need to interview?
Everyone who touches the process. The most valuable contradictions sit between the official owner of a step and whoever performs it; you find those by asking both.
Lightbloom AI starts by hearing the whole company privately and keeps the contradictions. Transcript does the hearing and builds the world model: /transcript.
References
- Tucker and Edmondson, California Management Review, Why Hospitals Don't Learn from Failures: Organizational and Psychological Dynamics that Inhibit System Change (2003), https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/employees/leadership-programs/leadership-foundations/why-hospitals-dont-learn.pdf
- Panopto, Inefficient Knowledge Sharing Costs Large Businesses $47 Million Per Year (2018), https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/inefficient-knowledge-sharing-costs-large-businesses-47-million-per-year-300681971.html
- CRICO (Candello), Malpractice Risks in Communication Failures (2015), https://www.candello.com/Insights/Candello-Reports/Communications-Report
Keep reading.
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