Every capability is present. Every team is competent. Every function is performing. And the person you serve walks through your organization and experiences chaos.
Not because anything is broken. Because nothing is connected.
This is the most common failure mode in organizational life, and it's the hardest one to name. You don't have a capability problem. You have an integration problem. And nobody sees it, because every part of the system looks fine when you examine it in isolation.
The capabilities are the ingredients. What's missing is the recipe.
The Pantry vs. the Kitchen
Imagine a well-stocked pantry. Flour, eggs, butter, sugar, vanilla, baking powder — everything you need. A stranger walks in and confirms: yes, all the ingredients are here. The pantry is complete.
Now ask them to bake a cake. They can't — not because anything is missing, but because having ingredients and having a recipe are fundamentally different things. The recipe tells you which ingredients combine, in what proportions, for what outcome. Without it, you have raw materials arranged on shelves. Not a cake.
Most organizations manage their pantry. They invest in capabilities, assess their maturity, track their performance. And then they wonder why the outcomes — the experiences their stakeholders actually have — feel fragmented and disconnected.
The problem isn't the ingredients. The problem is that nobody wrote down how they're supposed to combine.
What a Recipe Card Actually Shows
A recipe card, in organizational terms, does something a capability model can't do on its own. It takes a specific outcome — say, student success, or client onboarding, or patient safety — and identifies every capability ingredient that must come together to produce that outcome.
Not just the obvious ones. Not just the capabilities that sit in the department responsible for that outcome. All of them — including the enabling capabilities from other parts of the organization that nobody thinks of as relevant until they're missing.
Consider what it takes for a student to succeed at a university. The obvious ingredients are teaching, curriculum, assessment, academic advising. Those sit in the learning and teaching function. They're visible. They're managed.
But student success also depends on capabilities that sit outside teaching entirely: how the institution manages the student's end-to-end experience, whether analytics identify at-risk students before they fail, whether administrative processes have been stripped of unnecessary friction, whether career services connect to the academic journey or sit disconnected in a separate office.
A recipe card lists both types of ingredients: the core capabilities from the function that owns the outcome, and the enabling capabilities from across the organization that must contribute. It shows you the full recipe, not just the ingredients that are already on the counter.
The Three States of an Ingredient
When you hold a recipe card against reality, each ingredient can be in one of three states. The distinction matters enormously, because the type determines the response.
Present: The capability exists, is resourced, and performs at the level the outcome requires. No action needed. Move on.
Absent: The capability doesn't exist in any meaningful form. There are no people doing this work, no processes supporting it, no technology enabling it. This is a resource gap. You can't improve what you don't have. The fix is to build.
Present but not integrated: The capability exists. It might even be performing well. But it operates in its own silo, disconnected from the other ingredients the recipe requires. This is an integration gap — and it is, by far, the most common and most invisible failure.
The third state is the one that fools organizations. When a leadership team reviews its capabilities, each function reports that its capabilities are in place. And they are. The problem isn't with any individual function. The problem is in the spaces between them — the handoffs, the connections, the moments where a stakeholder moves from one part of the organization to another and experiences a gap that nobody inside the organization designed.
Integration Failures Are Experience Failures
Here's the insight that changes how you think about organizational performance: every integration gap is, from the stakeholder's perspective, an experience gap.
The person navigating your organization doesn't see capabilities. They experience a journey. They interact with one team, then another, then a system, then a process. Each interaction might be perfectly adequate in isolation. But if the transitions are clumsy — if they have to re-explain their situation, re-enter their information, navigate contradictory advice, or discover a service too late — the experience is fragmented. Not because anyone failed, but because the capabilities were never designed to work together.
This is the difference between a supply-side view and a demand-side view of the organization.
The supply side asks: Do we have the right capabilities? Are they adequately resourced? Are they performing?
The demand side asks: When those capabilities are supposed to combine to produce an outcome for someone we serve, do they actually produce that outcome? Does the person experience a coherent journey, or a series of disconnected encounters?
A capability model answers the supply-side question. A recipe card answers the demand-side question. Most organizations only ask the first one. And then they're puzzled when the people they serve report fragmented, frustrating experiences despite every internal metric being green.
The Heat Map Blind Spot
This is where the recipe card fills a gap that even the best capability assessment can't close on its own.
A capability heat map — the green-amber-red assessment from Chapter 4 — shows maturity against requirements. It's powerful. It ends arguments about whether gaps are real. But it has a structural limitation: it assesses capabilities individually.
A heat map might show that teaching is green, curriculum design is green, academic advising is amber, and career services is amber. A leadership team looking at that heat map might reasonably conclude that the organization is in decent shape. Most things are performing. A few need improvement.
The recipe card tells a different story. It shows that teaching, curriculum design, academic advising, career services, experience management, analytics, and process management all need to combine for the outcome to work. Several of those enabling capabilities might not even appear on the heat map, because nobody thought to assess them against this particular outcome. And the ones that do appear might be green in isolation while being completely disconnected from each other.
The heat map shows you the pantry. The recipe card shows you whether you can bake the cake. Both perspectives matter. But organizations that look only at the pantry will always be surprised when the cake doesn't come out right.
One Model, Multiple Conversations
A recipe card does something else that changes how leadership teams communicate: it translates the same reality into different languages for different audiences.
Take the same assessment and present it to three people.
The board member sees the strategic picture: "Of sixteen capability ingredients required for this outcome, three are absent and seven are present but not connected. The most critical gap is that nobody owns the end-to-end experience. Recommendation: invest in the orchestrating capability."
The program manager sees operational actions: "In your programs, career services is disconnected from the academic pathway. Students discover it too late. Action: embed career touchpoints at three points in the journey rather than offering it as a standalone service at the end."
The person you serve sees none of the architecture. They experience the result: "When I needed help, someone reached out before I had to ask. When I moved between departments, they already knew my situation. When I graduated, my next step was already arranged."
That third view is the one that matters most. Every organizational capability, every structural assessment, every investment decision exists to produce that experience. The recipe card connects the architectural conversation to the human outcome — which is the conversation that gives everything else its purpose.
From Assessment to Redesign
The recipe card assessment doesn't just diagnose. It prescribes — or more precisely, it shows you what kind of prescription is needed.
When an ingredient is absent, the response is to build. Hire, develop, procure — create the capability that doesn't exist. This takes time and investment, but at least the problem is clear.
When an ingredient is present but not integrated, the response is different. You don't need to build a new capability. You need to change how existing capabilities connect. That might mean redesigning handoff processes. It might mean creating a role or function that orchestrates the journey across departments. It might mean establishing shared metrics that force functions to optimize for the outcome rather than for their individual performance.
Integration problems are often cheaper to fix than resource problems, but they're politically harder. Because the fix requires functions that have operated independently to coordinate, share information, and sometimes subordinate their local optimization to a shared outcome. That's not a technology problem or a budget problem. It's a governance problem.
The recipe card makes the governance conversation possible by making the integration requirement visible. When everyone can see that the outcome requires these sixteen ingredients to combine, the question shifts from "Why should my department change how it operates?" to "How do we connect these ingredients to produce the result we all agreed we want?"
The Question Nobody Is Asking
Most leadership teams know their capability gaps. They have assessments, heat maps, maturity models. They invest in closing gaps.
Far fewer leadership teams know their integration gaps. They know that something about the experience they deliver feels fragmented, but they attribute it to culture, or personalities, or the inevitable friction of large organizations.
It's not inevitable. It's a design gap. The capabilities were never designed to combine. Nobody wrote the recipe. And without a recipe, every stakeholder is left to navigate the gaps on their own — assembling their own experience from whatever the organization's disconnected parts happen to offer.
The question worth asking isn't "Do we have the right capabilities?" It's the question that comes after that one: "Do those capabilities come together to produce the outcome we promised?"
If the answer is no, you don't need more ingredients. You need the recipe.
This post is drawn from Building the Common Language, a self-paced course that shows how recipe cards turn capability assessments into outcome-focused integration analysis — and why the gap between having the ingredients and baking the cake is the gap most organizations never close.