A company that used to ship in six weeks now ships in four months, and nobody can point to a specific reason. The team looks about the same, and the strategy hasn’t changed. The leadership is pulling the same levers that used to work, and the company is moving through treacle.
The first diagnosis most leadership teams reach for is either strategy or talent. If it’s strategy, the story is that the company has lost focus and is doing too many things at once. If it’s talent, the story is that the team has grown too fast and hiring quality has slipped. Both stories are real sometimes, and both are often the wrong answer, because the problem is sitting one layer below strategy and one layer above talent, in the part of the company that nobody thinks of as a thing they own.
That layer is the coordination layer: the set of meetings and reporting relationships by which decisions get made and work gets passed between teams. It has no director. It accretes over time, because every reorg leaves behind a committee and every escalation leaves behind a weekly review, and almost nobody goes back and removes either.
The signature of a coordination problem is that the work is happening but it isn’t compounding. People are busy and documents are being written, but the decisions that need to happen aren’t getting made, and projects that were supposed to close in a quarter keep slipping into the next one for reasons that look unfair on their own and systemic once listed together. The team hasn’t slowed down; the layer they’re working inside has got heavier.
Debugging this is a question of auditing the layer directly. Two questions do most of the work.
The first is whether each recurring meeting on the calendar is making the decisions it was supposed to make. Pick a recurring meeting and ask what decision it exists to produce, and when it last produced one. Anything that was created to make decisions and hasn’t made one in a quarter is either solving a problem that’s gone away or being blocked by something outside the meeting, and in both cases it’s costing the people in it more than it’s producing.
The second is where decisions on stuck projects live in the reporting graph. For every significant project running behind, find the person who owns the final call and check whether everyone on the project agrees it’s the same person. Projects that stall usually stall on an ambiguity there: two leaders each thinking the other owns the decision, or one leader thinking they own it when the organization below them doesn’t agree. The project pings between them with nothing getting resolved, and the ambiguity is invisible from above because both leaders look engaged.
Both questions point at the same thing. The company slowed down because nobody is treating the coordination layer as something they own. The meetings that used to produce decisions are still on the calendar out of habit, and the decisions that used to sit at specific reporting lines are drifting between leaders because nobody wrote down who owns what.
The coordination layer is a thing that has to be owned, with the same care given to hiring and strategy. A senior operator who takes it on finds gains there that aren’t available anywhere else, because nobody else has been looking. If the meetings and reporting ambiguities costing your company the most speed don’t come to mind right now, the layer they live in isn’t being owned yet.
Pillar IV
**AI and Teams**
> *Four memos on how AI is reshaping the work of individual > contributors: hiring, review, the junior role, and managing a team > where AI use is optional.*