> But the fact that they had to go up through officer levels to achieve that usually acted as a restraint, as quite often the senior exec would ask "tell me how

> But the fact that they had to go up through officer levels to achieve that usually acted as a restraint, as quite often the senior exec would ask "tell me how you screwed-up this project so badly that you need another team to save your bacon" Can a developer on Kansas City team not ask a seemingly straight-forward question about the current implementation of a service that the Memphis team runs? What would you say if you sent an instant message or an email to someone in another team and instead of getting a reply from them, you hear back nothing at all and one week later your boss says he is forwarding an email sent by another manager which includes the answer to your question (nothing secret, just details that we needed to know in the first place). Now apparently, the person I asked the question just forwarded the question to their manager with the answer. Their manager, being on vacation, couldn't forward the email for a week. What would you do next time you had a question? Would you contact your manager and have them contact the other team's manager and have them contact the project lead to answer a question? Or would you try to design your system so you had to interact with the Memphis team as little as possible?