Coordination Headwind - How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds

In order to get a clear understanding of the problem, let’s start with the boundary condition. Imagine a company of one employee. That employee writes and tests all the code, does all the marketing and sales, and manages herself. She has complete knowledge of everything in the company, makes all the decisions, needn’t communicate with anyone, and i

With no clear direction, people pursue the things that advance their own short-term interests, with little awareness of how their activities contribute to (or in some cases, derail) the long-term mission of the team as a whole.

An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project. An engineer might get stuck waiting for a decision or a manager may think she doesn’t have authority to make a critical purchase. These small, seemingly minor hesitations ca

See if you can identify with any of these issues: Results are less than the combined talent should be producing. Negative thinking and negative outlooks take root, and people sound like “victims” of the economy, the market, or someone else’s actions. One or two people have too much power on a team or in a department, which allows dysfunction to see

The second come-to-Jesus moment needs to occur as soon as something goes out of sync. Even with the tightest project management, it is an absolute guarantee that the team will go slightly out of sync every once in a while. And as soon as it does, the confusion it creates can lead to people getting overworked or working inefficiently, which will gen