Different teams can be right about different parts.

Put observations on one timeline

Choose a recent job or customer journey and reconstruct it from first contact to completion. Ask each team what they observed at its stage. Keep observations separate from explanations until the sequence is visible.

The familiar parable of people describing different parts of an elephant is a useful metaphor here. It is a teaching story, not evidence that all perspectives are equally accurate.

Find the handoff

Problems often become clearer at the boundary between stages. Sales may promise a delivery option that operations cannot support consistently. Operations may request information that was never collected. The customer experiences the combined system, regardless of which team owns each piece.

Resolve contradictions with evidence

Where accounts differ, inspect the brief, messages, timestamps or finished output. Do not settle a factual disagreement by averaging opinions. The purpose of multiple perspectives is to improve the account of what happened.

Choose a shared measure

A local improvement can move work onto another team. Review completion time, rework and customer experience across the sequence so one department's gain does not become another department's hidden cost. A useful system map gives everyone a more complete object to discuss than their own queue.