Communication rules are redesigned so two departments can no longer talk directly, and everything between them passes through one office that controls what each side learns.
An example
After an audit finding about medication errors, a hospital's new chief transformation officer won approval for a coordination protocol: every request between pharmacy and nursing would go through her office's ticketing system, with a weekly alignment meeting she chaired. The protocol cited the year-long formulary dispute between the pharmacy director and nursing leadership. The old practice, a charge nurse calling the pharmacist on duty, became a process violation, and a nurse manager who kept doing it was written up for lack of discipline. Requests that once took an hour took two days. The pharmacy director learned nursing's positions from the transformation office's summaries. When a dosing question about a new anticoagulant arrived during a weekend surge, it sat in the queue until Monday, and the pharmacy director wrote down the hours.
Why it works
Compliance is easy by design: invitations, templates, and forms make the checkpoint the default, and going around it takes deliberate effort. Direct contact looks worse, because the checkpoint controls which information counts as current, so informal answers lose their use. Going around it is costly: it gets called a process violation or a lack of discipline by the broker who controls upward reporting. Its footing is an operator with authority to redesign workflows, departments with weak ties or a recent conflict to cite, and a leadership team that prizes alignment.
The thinking behind it
Mark Granovetter Granovetter's The Strength of Weak Ties (1973) argues that acquaintances who connect separate groups carry new information more than close ties do. The direct contacts between two departments are such bridges, and routing everything through one office cuts them. Project shadowing, joint visits, and informal problem-solving rebuild the bridges the protocol removed.
Jeffrey Pfeffer Pfeffer's Power in Organizations (1981) names control of information and of the decision process as sources of power. An office that every request between two departments must pass through controls what each side learns and when, and gains power over both. Leaders who keep direct channels open deny any one office that position.
Warning signs
Requests that used to run peer to peer now all carry the same office in the routing. Going around it is called a process violation, a lack of discipline, or not being a team player. Each department learns the other's position from the broker's summaries. Response times grow. The redesign cites a past conflict between the two departments and speaks the language of governance and alignment.
How to defend yourself
Keep the direct tie alive, and make the cost of losing it visible.
- Maintain low-formality contact with your counterpart: project shadowing, joint visits to customers or units, shared problem-solving outside the protocol.
- Document the added delay and its effects on operations: dates, response times, consequences.
- When the delay starts to hurt operations, raise it with your counterpart and name the brokerage together, in the same forum.
- Propose a fix that keeps whatever coordination the protocol genuinely adds and restores direct contact for urgent work.
Broker control lasts only as long as the two of you never compare notes.
How a leader shuts it down
Design coordination to keep a central office informed without replacing direct contact between departments. Watch for one office becoming the only channel between two others, especially when the language of alignment is used to justify it. A broker who becomes a single point of failure is an operating risk, so time the routes and fix the slow ones.