Summary
You've identified the problem. Your departments are fraying. The silos are real. The revenue impact is measurable. Now what?
In Part 2 of The Fabric, Not the Thread, Jeff Pelliccio and Erin MacKenzie continue their conversation with Anna Frazzetto, Founder and CEO of AFM Strategic Partners, and shift from diagnosis to action. Anna walks through a tech rollout that looked great on paper and collapsed within three months — not because the tool was bad, but because nobody inspected whether the team was actually using it. She introduces her "inspect what you expect" framework, explains why she treats every rollout like a rehearsal dinner, and shares the three-touchpoint communication method she developed managing offshore teams. Jeff drops the line that may be the most shareable insight across both episodes: "The responsibility of the message landing properly is on the sender, not the receiver." And the PB&J exercise? It's the simplest proof that what you think you communicated and what your team actually heard are almost never the same thing.
Part 1 found the fray. This is where you build the loom.
The responsibility is on the sender, not the receiver: If your rollout failed, don't start by looking at the people who didn't execute. Start by asking whether the message was ever woven into the way they actually work. Ownership of communication sits with the person sending it.
Inspect what you expect: Rolling something out and walking away isn't leadership. Anna's framework: if you set an expectation, follow up on it. Use gaps as learning opportunities, not blame opportunities. The rollouts that unravel are the ones where nobody checked back in.
Over-communication hasn't failed yet: Anna uses three touchpoints for every initiative: a team meeting to discuss, a follow-up email to document, and a check-in the following week to confirm understanding. It sounds like a lot. Until that third touchpoint is when someone finally says, "Oh, now I get it."
The PB&J test reveals everything: Ask your team to write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Watch the assumptions surface. Some people skip "open the jar." That's the same gap that kills your rollouts — the assumption that everyone sees the same picture you do.
Treat every rollout like a rehearsal dinner: Before you go live, bring every team member and their managers together for a final check. Make sure Jane knows her role, John knows his, and nobody's carrying a hidden red flag. The tighter the rehearsal, the faster you recover when something breaks.
Build templates that outlast the project: The best organizations don't reinvent the rollout every time. They build a repeatable project plan — who's involved, how communication happens, where the checkpoints are — and use it from project to project. The loom becomes a system, not a one-time effort.
Thinking in fabric is a leadership identity: Cross-functional leadership isn't a trend. It's a philosophy. The leaders who see the full pattern — not just their own thread — are the ones who move entire organizations forward.
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