Fidelity of the Handoff

When I was a kid, my father showed me a cartoon that still pops into my head. It came up a lot with my work in IT service management, customer service, and now with my focus on corporate narrative and storytelling.

You’ve probably seen it: a swing hanging from a tree, drawn ten different ways in sequence to show how each team in a company interpreted the same request.

What the customer requested. What sales promised. What engineering built. What was delivered.

And, of course, what the customer actually needed.

Each version slightly off. The result? A mess.

It’s not about anyone screwing up—it’s about how meaning slips when you assume everyone’s on the same page.

It’s the corporate version of telephone—the game where a whispered phrase gets repeated down a line, changing a little each time, until it’s unrecognizable by the end.

That’s what happens when you lose fidelity in the handoff—everyone’s doing their job, but the outcome still feels off.

And here’s the twist: the faster we move, the faster that breakdown happens.

Enter GenAI.

GenAI doesn’t understand what you mean. It understands what you typed. Which means what happens next—how that draft gets interpreted, refined, implemented—depends entirely on how well you infused context at the beginning.

That’s where fidelity breaks. And that’s what this issue is about.

GenAI is a new kind of teammate—Not a translator

We’re all experimenting with GenAI tools. Drafting emails. Outlining decks. Mocking up pitch ideas. Even building full-blown apps and websites. And when it works, it feels like magic.

But here’s the catch: it doesn’t understand your intention.

It doesn’t know your customers’ context. It doesn’t know what not to say. It doesn’t know why your message matters to this audience, at this moment.

That’s not a bug—it’s how it’s built. GenAI helps you go faster. But it can only move forward with the inputs you give it. And the problem isn’t that it generates bad content.

The problem is that it generates content without continuity.

And when you hand that content off—without reinforcing the intent, the nuance, the narrative spine—you risk creating a product or delivering a message that no longer aligns with your strategy.

From a storytelling point of view—a lens I use often—that’s how a corporate narrative becomes corporate noise.

GenAI Gets You to POC—Not to Done

Think of GenAI as your fastest path to a proof of concept.

Like I wrote about in Start with NOT a Blank Page, it gets you from blank page to rough draft in seconds. Whether it’s an email, a pitch, a positioning statement, or even a block of code—it can sketch the idea, test the format, and simulate the tone.

But the moment that draft enters the hands of someone else—your team, your customer, your investor—that’s when the real work begins.

Because no matter how good the output looks, it’s still just a guess. A plausible version of what you might mean, not a refined version of what you do mean.

That’s where fidelity of the handoff becomes everything.

If the human expert picking it up doesn’t know what problem you’re solving, what audience you’re serving, or what tradeoffs you made—they’re not improving the draft. They’re reinterpreting it.

And just like that, your proof of concept becomes a source of confusion.

This isn’t just about AI. This is everywhere.

I’ve seen this happen in product teams, marketing orgs, investor decks, customer onboarding, and analyst briefings.

It’s not the lack of talent. It’s the lack of transmission.

• Sales overpromises. CS inherits the gap.

• Strategy crafts a vision. GTM teams get a slogan.

• Founders explain “the why.” Designers get “make it blue.”

• Marketing writes great copy. It shows up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This isn’t new. What’s different now is how fast it falls apart.

It’s about expectations, too

In a recent issue of this newsletter, I’ll Call You Back, I wrote about how unmet expectations—not delay—are what erode trust.

It’s not the 40-minute hold that frustrates the customer. It’s telling them, “We’ll be right with you”—and then disappearing.

The same thing happens with messaging.

You tell your customer one thing. Your product tells them another. You give your team a slide. They give the market a slogan. Everyone thinks they’re saying the same thing—until they’re not.

That’s how you end up with a swing no one asked for.

Not because anyone meant to get it wrong. But because every person along the chain was working off a different understanding of what “right” looked like.

Fidelity of the handoff means people walk away with what you meant, not just what you handed them.

What high-fidelity communication looks like

When you build a strong narrative foundation—a clear, well-aligned point of view—it acts like connective tissue across every function. It ensures that:

• Everyone knows what game you’re playing—and how you win.

• Teams don’t just reuse phrases; they extend meaning.

• AI becomes a multiplier, not a megaphone for misalignment.

I will be covering this more deeply very soon (there's a book coming!) so stay tuned. Because fidelity of the handoff isn’t just a messaging challenge. It’s a leadership challenge. A culture challenge. A strategy challenge.

It's about making sure that the core of your message—the heartbeat of your story—survives every expression.

Vibe Coding Is the New Handoff

There’s a term that’s been floating around the culture lately: vibe coding.

It started in creative and design circles, but it’s everywhere now—especially in AI workflows. The idea is simple: when you're working with GenAI, you're not giving it specs. You're giving it a feeling. A reference. A tone. A starting point that says, make it feel like this.

You’re not writing code. You’re writing intent.

And here’s the part that matters for us: that’s the new handoff.

When you use GenAI to start a draft—of an email, a pitch, a product spec—you’re vibe coding your intent into the machine. And if you don’t? It just makes something up.

The same thing happens with teams.

If you pass along a project without the thinking behind it, without the “why now,” without the customer’s lens or the strategic direction—you’re leaving the vibe uncoded. And the output reflects that. It might be technically correct, but emotionally off. Or strategically safe. Or just plain forgettable.

That’s why fidelity of the handoff matters more now than ever.

You’re not just handing off a task. You’re handing off how it’s going to be understood.

So how do you encode intent? How do you preserve momentum without constant intervention? You tell better stories.

Not stories as in slogans or slogans disguised as mission statements. I mean real, structured, purposeful narrative. That’s what gives the next person the context to make decisions without derailing the strategy. It’s what turns alignment into acceleration.

This is where strong narrative infrastructure makes the difference.

Because when the strategy is clear, when the voice is consistent, and when the story has structure—you don’t need to be in the room for people to get it right.

That’s not just branding. That’s how your company actually runs.

5 ways to protect the narrative in motion

1. Lead with intention, not just content. What are we trying to help someone understand, decide, or do?

2. Give the prompt history. Whether you’re using GenAI or Slack, don’t just pass the asset. Pass the thinking.

3. Stress-test comprehension. Ask: “What would you do next with this?” Their answer tells you what they actually heard.

4. Use fewer handoffs—or build better bridges. The more you delegate without alignment, the more drift you invite.

5. Codify the narrative. Then teach it. You don’t need more documents. You need shared understanding. And repetition.

The Bottom Line

GenAI is great at getting you started. It can help you move faster, explore ideas, and get past the blank page. But it doesn't know your customer. It doesn't know your strategy. And it doesn’t know the difference between a message that lands and one that just sounds good.

That part is still on you.

Because what you generate is just a starting point.
What actually gets delivered—what gets understood—depends on the fidelity of the handoff.

Every function. Every role. Every tool. If your message breaks down when it changes hands, you don’t have an execution problem.
You have a story problem.

The solution isn’t more content. It’s better communication.
More context. Clearer expectations. And a narrative that holds up under pressure.

That’s how you scale clarity.

That’s how your team stops interpreting and starts amplifying.

That’s how you go from proof of concept to proof it works.

Berkson’s Bits

This one is for the startups.

What business are you in? And tell me without talking about your product.

What is concerning you so much that you are going to spend years of your life building to solve it?

What I'm Listening To

One of my favorite songs is also some of my favorite advice:

Nine People's Favorite Thing from [title of show]

Are you unique or a replaceable cog?

I was thinking of a song from the clever Broadway musical, [Title of Show].

The lyric goes:

I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing
than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing.

In a conversation with my theater director/producer daughter, Amanda Berkson, she was explaining to me how, to be successful as an actor, you need to show how you are unique. If you try too hard to fit a mold, it means they can hire any one of a group of people who are all similar. If you are unique and they want someone like you, well, you’re the only one.

Are you a product manager or are you a product manager who specializes in applying analytics to existing products?

Are you a finance manager or are you a finance manager who is great at managing risk for late stage startups?

If you try to appeal to everyone, you have a lot of competition. If you try to appeal to your target segment, you can stand out.

Be nine people’s favorite thing.

When I talk about corporate narrative these days I’ve been using this phrase as a shorthand for what success looks like: “Your narrative needs to be repeatable, transferrable, and exciting.”

Exciting is the creative part. The repeatable and transferrable part is about fidelity of the handoff. It’s making sure you’re NOT playing that game of telephone.

My father, Stan Berkson, was in the graphic design business. One of his specialties was what he called logo repair. Back in the pre-digital age, someone would have a copy of their logo that they would reproduce on a copying machine. Each time they needed to use the logo, they made a copy. Each copy was not quite the same as the original. A copy of a copy was even worse. You see where this is going. Eventually they had a version of the logo that was sloppy, blurry, and only vaguely resembled the original. There was no fidelity in the handoff.

My father would take the blurry copy and edit it, pixel by pixel, to get a restored, reproducible original.

If your message degrades every time it moves to the next function, tool, or team, you don’t have a scaling problem. You have a story problem.

And fixing that? That’s the kind of work I love doing. I guess I got that from my father.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation…

Alan