When a project delivers something technically correct that nobody actually uses, that's a distance problem. When a system goes live and the team immediately builds workarounds — distance problem. When the project closes and the outcome doesn't follow — distance problem. Distance between the builders and the business problem they're supposed to be solving. Distance between the delivery team and the people who actually do the work. Distance between what was agreed in the planning session and what the people building it understood. Most technology engagements are structured in ways that make this distance inevitable. An external team is briefed, goes away, and returns with a product. A vendor account manager manages the relationship while a delivery team three steps removed does the work. An internal IT team builds something the business unit didn't meaningfully contribute to designing. The distance is baked in. The outcome failure is just what happens next. This is why post-mortems are always technically accurate but never fix anything. They describe what went wrong on the surface. They never identify the structural condition that made it almost certain to go wrong in the first place.