The alert posted to a shared Teams channel with forty members. Everyone saw it. Nobody owned it. Three days later someone finally asked who was supposed to act. The honest answer was nobody, because a channel isn't a person.
Definition
The signal reaches one named person under a stated response SLA. Not a channel. Not a distribution list. A person, with the data context attached, in the tool they already work in.
Route fails quietly. A signal that reaches a channel or a distribution list looks routed: the notification sent, the box checked. But nobody is actually accountable for acting on it inside a defined window. The fix isn't a better notification system. It's naming one person per decision category, in advance, before the next exception fires.
Why does a signal that reaches someone still stall?
Reaching someone and reaching the person accountable for that decision category are different things. A Teams channel with forty members satisfies "the signal was sent" without satisfying "someone owns responding to it." Route only counts when one named person, with a stated response SLA, gets the alert in the tool they already work in, not a channel they might check.