The seam is where the experience actually breaks

Most failures are not inside a team. They are in the space between two of them.

Map any complaint properly and it usually lands in a handover. The order was taken correctly and fulfilled correctly, but something was lost in the passing. A note did not travel. A field did not map across. A commitment made verbally was never written anywhere the next person could see. Each team, asked about it afterwards, will honestly say it did its part. Both are telling the truth, and the customer still had a bad time. That is the signature of a seam problem, and it is far more common than incompetence.

Seams are structurally neglected because nobody is measured on them. A manager is accountable for what happens inside a boundary, so effort concentrates there. The handover is everyone's edge and nobody's centre. It gets a procedure document rather than an owner, and procedure documents do not notice when they stop matching reality. Meanwhile the seam multiplies: a journey with six stages has five handovers, and each one is an opportunity for information to thin out.

The practical fix is unglamorous. Name someone accountable for each handover, not for the teams either side of it. Ask what information must travel, then check what actually arrives. Watch a real case cross the boundary rather than reading the process map, because the map describes intention and the case describes practice. Where the two disagree, the case is right.