We use that phrase all the time without reflecting on what it really means in practice. But it is worth thinking about, because in the places where handovers are most precise, most rehearsed, and most consequential, “getting up to speed” does not happen after the handover. It happens before.
Where handovers are a science
In a relay race, the baton pass happens inside a 20-metre exchange zone. Both runners are inside it at the same time, both running at full speed. The incoming runner doesn’t stop and place the baton on a table. The outgoing runner doesn’t start from standing. By the time the baton changes hands, the receiver is already at pace.
Most corporate handovers skip the exchange zone entirely.
That’s what a handover looks like when it’s designed properly. The new person isn’t left alone, scrambling to make sense of what they’ve been given. It’s something both people do together, side by side, in a defined space, before the pass is complete. Most corporate handovers skip the exchange zone entirely.
Where it goes wrong
Relay teams get disqualified for specific, well-documented mistakes – and the parallels to organisational life are hard to ignore.
The most common is passing outside the exchange zone. If the baton doesn’t transfer while both runners are inside the marked zone, the team is disqualified. In corporate terms, this is the handover with no overlap – no period where both parties are running together, testing, questioning, adjusting. The artefact gets passed across a table, and everyone hopes for the best.
The second is mistimed acceleration. The outgoing runner starts too early or too late, and the actual handoff happens beyond the zone – even though both runners were technically in it at some point. In organisations, this looks like involvement that’s too late (by the time they’re brought in, the decisions have already been made, and “input” is really just “sign-off”).
The third is subtler: no clear verbal cue. In blind exchanges – where the outgoing runner can’t see the incoming one – a missed call or unclear signal causes hesitation. The receiver reaches back too late, or not at all. In projects, this is the absence of a shared language for where you are in the process. People don’t know when to expect the pass, don’t know what “ready” looks like, and freeze or fumble when the moment arrives.
In all three cases, the failure isn’t about talent or effort. It’s about design.
Failure isn’t about talent or effort. It’s about design.
In organisations, these failures are expensive. They show up as clarification meetings, rework, indifference, and managers quietly making strategy safer and smaller. By the time the work reaches the people expected to carry it, the original intent has often been stripped of both nuance and energy.
Where strategies lose momentum
Early in my career, I worked as a designer in agencies. We’d receive a brief from the strategy team – a neat document summarising the problem, the audience, the direction. What wasn’t in the brief was everything the strategist had learned along the way: the nuance, the dead ends, the half-formed observations that might have contained the kernel of a big creative idea. All of that stayed in the strategist’s head. What I got was the conclusion without the journey.
The same thing happens at a much larger scale when a leadership team creates a new strategy. They’ve been through weeks or months of discussion, debate, and negotiation. They’ve wrestled with trade-offs. They’ve changed their minds. By the time they announce the result, they understand it deeply – because they lived through the process of making it.
If managers inherit only the answer, not the reasoning behind it, they do what sensible people do under pressure: they simplify, de-risk, and translate.
Then they present it to the next level down. “Here’s the strategy. Here’s what it means. Now go and make it happen.” This is usually the level below senior leadership: the people who have to turn broad direction into choices, priorities, and local action. If they inherit only the answer, not the reasoning behind it, they do what sensible people do under pressure: they simplify, de-risk, and translate.
This is where most transformations lose momentum. Not at the top, where the strategy was made, but at each subsequent pass – each point where ownership has to move from one group to the next. If there is no exchange zone, the strategy gets thinner and more abstract with every handover, until it arrives as a set of instructions that people neither really understand nor feel any connection to. At that point, it becomes very easy to ignore.
What a real exchange zone looks like
A few weeks ago, I worked with a management team to create their purpose and vision. We did it in a single day. By the end, I had to raise my hand to say goodbye – because they were already implementing. They weren’t “getting up to speed” with something I’d handed them. They’d built it themselves, in real time, and by the afternoon they were running with it.
That’s what a well-designed exchange zone produces. It isn’t about spending longer on handovers. It’s about designing a process where ownership builds throughout, so the final pass is just the last moment of something already in motion.
The mechanism underneath this is consistent. We recently analysed over 120 hours of meeting transcripts across two large transformation projects and found that on the way to taking ownership, people tend to move through four stages: concern, information-seeking, principle-setting and autonomous action.
Ownership transfer happens in four stages: concern, information-seeking, principle-setting and autonomous action.
The order was the same regardless of personality, seniority, or context. What varied was speed. In the one-day session, the design of the process compressed all four stages into a few hours. In longer projects, it might take months. But the sequence is invariant – and when you design for it, people move through it. When you don’t, they stall at stage one. Which, in most organisations, looks like resistance.
How to design for ownership transfer
The principle is simple: at every level, people need to understand the journey the previous group went through, and they need to co-create the next stage they’ll own. Not receive it. Not be briefed on it. Co-create it – so they have agency at their level.
This applies whether you’re building the artefact in the first place or handing it on to the next group who’ll carry it forward. The mechanism might differ – a three-hour workshop, a two-day session, a months-long process – but the principle holds.
Two tips for your practice:
Share the journey, not just the conclusion. If people only see the final answer, they cannot judge it, adapt it, or defend it. Show the trade-offs that shaped the decision, the options you rejected, and the tensions you had to resolve. Otherwise people inherit an answer without understanding the problem it was built to solve.
The strategist’s brief was useless to me not because the thinking was bad, but because I only got the answer. The reasoning, the discarded options, the “what if” moments – that’s where the real value was. When you’re transferring ownership, bring people into the journey that got you here. Not every detail, but enough that they understand why, not just what.
Design for co-creation, not presentation. Do not bring the next group in once the key decisions are fixed and call it alignment. Bring them in early enough to test the logic, shape what they will own, and make meaningful choices. For that to work, people need to know what is truly non-negotiable, where they have freedom to adapt, and who holds final decision rights.
The exchange zone doesn’t have to be long – but both runners have to be in it at the same time, and both have to be moving.
For leaders, this is not a communication task to delegate at the end. It is a design decision to make at the start. If ownership needs to travel through the organisation, the exchange zones need to be built in before the first announcement is ever made.
The finish line matters
In a relay, the team doesn’t win when the first runner finishes their leg. The team wins when the last runner crosses the line. It doesn’t matter if the first runner was the fastest in the field – if the final pass is fumbled, none of it counts.
A transformation works the same way. It’s not complete when the strategy is written. It’s not complete when it’s announced. It’s complete when the whole organisation is acting on it – when the last person in the chain is running at full speed with something they understand and own.
That’s the finish line. And you don’t get there without designing the exchange zone at every pass along the way.
