Presuming it's not an issue of laziness, or incompetence, or of higher priorities trumping your request, why are you looking at your McGuffin instead of communicating with the person you assigned the task?
The point is that this "canary McGuffin" revealed there was an issue that talking to them didn't. That issue might be all kinds of things, including poor communication prior, but that's incidental to the fact that having an idea of how the tasks should proceed means you have a non-intrusive way of checking if their communication means what you think it does.
I'm seeing a bit of a pattern in these blog posts, where the author is more interested in proving their superiority over others than in actually getting stuff done.
I've noticed this happens a LOT in all kinds of meetings. I myself am guilty of it, so now I try to think before I speak, "if I raise this pedantic point, will that actually help further the team's goals?" Usually the answer is NO.
her