Alignment is not a state that persists once achieved. It is continuous work that must be performed constantly to prevent natural drift. The work is mostly invisible, almost entirely untracked, and consumes resources that grow exponentially as organizations scale.
Organizations talk about alignment as if it is something you establish and then maintain through periodic check-ins. Create a strategy document. Hold an all-hands. Send a memo. Alignment achieved.
This is fiction. Alignment is not an event. It is not a document. It is ongoing labor performed by dozens or hundreds of people who translate, synchronize, clarify, and reconcile information flows that would otherwise diverge.
The work happens in meetings no one remembers. In Slack threads that summarize decisions. In emails that loop in people who were not present. In hallway conversations that prevent future conflicts. In documentation that explains context. In repeated explanations of the same concepts to different audiences.
Most of this work is invisible. It does not appear on roadmaps. It is not tracked in project management tools. It is not counted as billable time. It is not recognized as a skill. It is just expected to happen.
When organizations grow, they do not account for how much of their capacity will be consumed by alignment work. They hire people to build products, write code, close deals, serve customers. Then they discover that half of everyone’s time is spent making sure their work does not conflict with what other people are doing.
The alignment work becomes the product. The actual work becomes secondary.
Why Alignment Decays Without Continuous Effort
Alignment is not a default state. It is a maintained state that requires constant energy input to prevent entropy.
Two people start a project. They agree on goals. They divide work. They are aligned.
A week passes. Person A discovers that the original plan does not work. They adjust their approach. They do not tell Person B because it seems like a minor change. Person B continues executing the original plan. They are no longer aligned.
Person B encounters a blocker. They make a decision to unblock themselves. The decision makes sense given what Person B knows. Person A would have chosen differently if they knew about the blocker. They are further misaligned.
A new person joins. They read the documentation. The documentation describes the original plan, not the adjustments. They build based on outdated assumptions. The misalignment compounds.
Without active synchronization, every independent decision creates drift. Every new person multiplies drift. Every day that passes without explicit coordination is a day of accumulating misalignment.
This is structural, not cultural. Well-meaning people in high-trust environments still experience drift. The issue is not lack of effort. The issue is that information does not propagate automatically and decisions do not synchronize without deliberate work.
That work must be performed continuously. It is never complete. It is never finished. It is maintenance work that keeps the organization from flying apart.
The Translation Layer That No One Plans For
Technical teams speak in technical terms. Product teams speak in customer outcomes. Business teams speak in revenue and margins. Executives speak in strategy and positioning.
These are not just different vocabularies. They are different ontologies. Different ways of decomposing problems. Different assumptions about what matters.
Translation between these ontologies is constant work. An engineer must translate customer complaints into technical causes. A product manager must translate technical constraints into customer impact. A business analyst must translate market dynamics into product requirements. An executive must translate competitive positioning into engineering priorities.
Each translation is lossy. Each translation introduces ambiguity. Each translation requires judgment about what to preserve and what to simplify.
The translation work is rarely assigned explicitly. It happens in the gaps between formal roles. Someone realizes that two teams are talking past each other and steps in to clarify. Someone notices that a decision makes sense in one context but will fail in another context and intervenes to explain why.
This work is essential. Without it, teams optimize for local goals that conflict at the system level. Engineering builds for technical elegance. Product builds for feature breadth. Business builds for short-term revenue. The sum is incoherent.
Organizations underestimate how much translation capacity they need. They assume people will naturally understand each other. They do not. They assume information will flow smoothly across boundaries. It does not. They assume alignment will emerge from shared goals. It will not.
Translation must be performed explicitly and continuously. The people who do this work are often the most valuable people in the organization. They are rarely recognized as such because the work is invisible and the impact is counterfactual. Things did not go wrong. No one knows that this was because someone prevented the misalignment.
When Synchronization Meetings Multiply Faster Than Headcount
At five people, synchronization is informal. Everyone overhears most conversations. Decisions propagate organically. Alignment happens as a byproduct of working in the same room.
At fifteen people, synchronization requires scheduled meetings. Daily standups. Weekly planning. Monthly reviews. The meetings are efficient. They take an hour or two per week. The cost is acceptable.
At fifty people, synchronization becomes a job function. Program managers exist primarily to keep teams aligned. They schedule cross-team syncs. They maintain RACI matrices. They track dependencies. They escalate conflicts. They spend forty hours per week on alignment work.
At two hundred people, synchronization consumes a measurable percentage of total organizational capacity. Multiple layers of program management. Daily syncs within teams, weekly syncs across teams, monthly syncs across departments. Steering committees. Working groups. Integration meetings. Pre-meetings to prepare for meetings. Post-meetings to clarify decisions from meetings.
The synchronization overhead grows faster than headcount because communication paths grow combinatorially. Each new person must be synchronized with everyone their work affects. Each new team creates new interfaces that must be managed. Each new layer creates new translation requirements.
Organizations assume that structure solves this. Create clear boundaries. Define interfaces. Assign ownership. This helps but does not eliminate the problem. Even with clean boundaries, teams must coordinate at interfaces. Even with defined ownership, decisions have cross-team implications. Even with explicit processes, exceptions require negotiation.
The synchronization work does not go away. It gets formalized into roles and meetings and documentation. The people doing the work are no longer called coordinators. They are called project managers, product managers, engineering managers, staff engineers, architects, program managers, technical program managers, delivery leads, scrum masters.
Titles vary. Function is the same. Keep things aligned. Prevent drift. Translate between contexts. Synchronize decisions. Reconcile conflicts. Enable work to happen without constant collision.
At scale, more people do alignment work than do the work being aligned. This is not dysfunction. This is the actual cost of coordination at scale. Organizations that refuse to pay this cost do not have better alignment. They have invisible misalignment that manifests as rework, delays, conflicts, and failed launches.
The Context Overhead Tax on Every Decision
Decisions require context. Small decisions require small amounts of context. Large decisions require large amounts of context. Cross-team decisions require context from multiple domains.
In a small organization, everyone has most of the context most of the time. Decisions can be made quickly because the information needed to decide is already in the heads of the people making the decision.
In a large organization, context is fragmented. No one person has complete context. Every decision requires gathering context from multiple people. This gathering is overhead. It is work that must be done before the actual decision work can begin.
An engineer needs to change an API. This seems like a technical decision. But the API is used by three other teams. One team is building a feature that depends on the current API behavior. Another team is planning a refactor that assumes the API will change in a different way. A third team just finished a migration that will break if the API changes now.
The engineer does not know any of this. They propose a change. Someone catches it in code review. Now there must be a meeting. The meeting involves six people. Five of those people are there only to provide context. They explain their constraints. The engineer learns that their proposed change will not work. They propose an alternative. This requires another round of context gathering to verify that the alternative does not break something else.
This cycle repeats until a solution is found that satisfies all constraints. The actual technical change might take two hours. The context gathering and alignment work takes two weeks.
Multiply this by hundreds of decisions per week. The context overhead dominates the decision work. Organizations spend more time figuring out what not to break than they spend building new things.
This overhead is not waste. It is the necessary cost of making good decisions in a complex system. But it is overhead that must be paid continuously. It is invisible until you track it. It is shocking when you measure it.
Why Documentation Decays Faster Than It Is Written
Documentation is the primary tool for reducing alignment overhead. Write things down once. People read documentation instead of asking questions. Context propagates without meetings.
This theory assumes documentation stays current. It does not.
Documentation is written at a point in time. It describes how things work at that moment. Then things change. The code changes. The process changes. The strategy changes. The team changes. The documentation does not change automatically.
Someone must update documentation when reality diverges. This is alignment work. It is work that produces no visible output. It is work that is easily deferred. It is work that compounds into documentation debt.
Three months later, documentation describes a system that no longer exists. New people read the documentation. They follow outdated instructions. They build on incorrect assumptions. Someone more experienced must intervene to correct them. This correction is more alignment work.
The correction often happens verbally. The documentation remains wrong. The next new person encounters the same problem. The cycle repeats.
Organizations respond by declaring that documentation is a priority. They establish documentation requirements. They add documentation review to approval processes. They create documentation roles.
This helps but does not solve the problem. Documentation is easier to write than to maintain. Maintenance requires knowing when something has changed and how that change affects documented information. This knowing requires continuous attention to both documentation and reality. Most people lack the time or incentive to do this.
The result is documentation that is partially accurate, unknown reliability, and high cost to verify. People learn not to trust documentation. They ask questions instead. The documentation exists but does not reduce alignment overhead. It becomes another artifact to maintain without providing the benefit it is supposed to provide.
The Notification Fatigue That Prevents Awareness
Organizations implement notification systems to keep people informed. Slack channels. Email distribution lists. Jira updates. Calendar invites. Dashboard alerts. GitHub notifications. Project management tool updates.
The theory is that notifications create passive awareness. People are automatically informed when something relevant changes. They do not need to actively check for updates. Alignment happens through ambient information flow.
The practice is notification overload. Every system sends notifications. Every notification demands attention. Most notifications are not relevant to most recipients. People learn to ignore notifications. The signal drowns in noise.
This creates a paradox. Information is broadcast widely but absorbed rarely. Everyone is notified but no one is informed. The notification systems generate the appearance of communication without the reality of shared understanding.
People respond by filtering aggressively. They mute channels. They create email rules. They disable notifications. They check systems only when directly prompted. This filtering is rational self-defense against attention overload. It is also the mechanism by which critical information fails to propagate.
Something important changes. A notification is sent. The notification is filtered or ignored. Someone proceeds with work that is now misaligned. The misalignment is discovered later. Someone must correct it. This correction is alignment work that would have been unnecessary if the notification had been received and processed.
Organizations respond by sending more notifications and marking more things as urgent. This makes the problem worse. When everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. People tune out even legitimate critical notifications.
The notification systems still exist. They consume attention without providing coordination. They are alignment infrastructure that fails to produce alignment. Organizations continue investing in better notification systems without addressing the fundamental problem: broadcast communication is not the same as shared understanding.
When Dependencies Become Invisible Bottlenecks
Work dependencies are alignment problems. Team A cannot proceed until Team B completes their work. Team B is not aware that Team A is blocked. The dependency was not tracked explicitly. The blocker persists until someone notices and escalates.
This happens constantly. Dependencies exist at multiple levels. Code dependencies. Data dependencies. Resource dependencies. Knowledge dependencies. Decision dependencies. Each type requires different tracking and coordination mechanisms.
Organizations implement dependency tracking tools. Gantt charts. Dependency graphs. Blocking ticket relationships. These tools help when dependencies are known and recorded. Most dependencies are not.
Dependencies emerge during work. Someone starts a task and discovers they need something from another team. The need was not anticipated during planning. The other team is working on different priorities. The requesting team must negotiate for capacity. This negotiation is alignment work.
Or the dependency is not surfaced at all. Someone works around it. They build a temporary solution that will need to be replaced later. The workaround creates technical debt. The debt is alignment debt. Someone will eventually have to coordinate the removal of the workaround and integration of the proper solution.
Or someone waits. They are blocked but do not escalate because the dependency seems like it should be resolved soon. Days pass. The blocker persists. By the time it is escalated, the delay has propagated to multiple downstream tasks. The coordination work to recover the timeline is more expensive than the coordination work to prevent the block would have been.
Implicit dependencies are the most expensive. These are dependencies that exist in the structure of the work but are not understood by the people doing the work. Someone changes a system. The change breaks a different system that depends on the behavior that was changed. The dependency was not documented. The person making the change was not aware of it. The break is discovered in production or late in testing. The fix is costly. The coordination work to prevent future breaks is ongoing.
Organizations accumulate invisible dependencies. Each dependency is a coordination point. Each coordination point requires alignment work. The work grows as the dependency graph grows. The graph grows as the system grows. The alignment work scales with system complexity, not just with headcount.
The Meeting That Exists Only to Prepare for Another Meeting
Meetings are synchronization mechanisms. They gather people with different contexts into the same space to make decisions or share information. This is legitimate alignment work.
But meetings also generate second-order meetings. Pre-meetings to align on what will be discussed in the actual meeting. Post-meetings to clarify what was decided in the meeting. Side meetings to resolve disagreements that surfaced during the meeting. Follow-up meetings because the original meeting ran out of time.
Each second-order meeting is alignment work. The work is necessary because the original meeting did not achieve perfect alignment. Either the participants were not prepared, or they disagreed, or the topic was too complex for the allocated time, or key stakeholders were missing.
Organizations with high meeting overhead are not dysfunctional. They are paying the actual coordination cost of complex work. The meetings exist because alignment is hard and requires repeated iteration.
The pre-meeting exists because showing up to the actual meeting unprepared wastes everyone’s time. The pre-meeting aligns a subset of people so they can align the larger group more efficiently. The math makes sense if the pre-meeting saves more time in the actual meeting than it costs.
But the pre-meeting may require its own pre-meeting if the subset is not aligned. This is not absurd. This is the cost of gathering consensus in a system where different people have different information, different incentives, and different constraints.
The post-meeting exists because meetings end with ambiguity. What was decided? Who is responsible? What happens next? The post-meeting clarifies and documents. This work is necessary. If not done, people leave with different interpretations. The misalignment manifests later as conflicting work.
The side meeting exists because public disagreement is costly. Two people have a fundamental conflict that will derail the main meeting. They meet separately to resolve it or agree on a process for resolution. This is alignment work that enables the main meeting to function.
Organizations that minimize meetings without addressing the underlying alignment needs do not reduce coordination overhead. They shift it to asynchronous communication that is less efficient. Slack threads that should have been five-minute conversations become day-long exchanges. Decisions that could have been made in a room take weeks to finalize through email.
The meeting overhead is real. The alternative overhead is often worse. The alignment work must be done somewhere. Meetings are expensive. Everything else is more expensive.
When Alignment Work Becomes Someone’s Full Job
Organizations create roles specifically for alignment work. Product managers. Program managers. Engineering managers. Technical program managers. Delivery leads. Integration engineers. Solutions architects.
These roles are not overhead. They are recognition that alignment work is full-time work and someone must do it intentionally or it will not happen reliably.
A product manager translates between customer needs, business goals, and technical constraints. This translation is continuous. Customer needs evolve. Business goals shift. Technical constraints change as systems are built. The product manager maintains coherence across these domains. They prevent teams from building things that do not solve customer problems or building solutions that do not align with business strategy or building products that are technically infeasible.
Without a product manager, engineers make these translations themselves. They spend half their time trying to understand what customers actually need and whether what they are building aligns with business goals. This is less efficient. Engineers are not optimized for customer research or business strategy. They do the translation work but do it worse. The organization has the same coordination cost but worse coordination outcomes.
A program manager synchronizes dependencies across teams. They maintain the dependency graph. They identify bottlenecks. They escalate blocks. They facilitate resolution of cross-team conflicts. This is continuous work that scales with project complexity and team count.
Without a program manager, individual contributors do this work informally. They discover dependencies during implementation. They escalate blocks when they become critical. They resolve conflicts through extended negotiation. The coordination happens but less efficiently and with more friction.
Specialized coordination roles are recognition that alignment work is skilled work that benefits from focus and expertise. Someone who spends all their time on coordination develops better coordination practices than someone who does coordination as a side task while trying to write code or design products.
Organizations resist creating these roles because they look like overhead. They are not building products. They are not closing deals. They are not shipping code. But they are enabling everyone else to do these things without constant collision. The value is counterfactual and therefore invisible.
Organizations that underinvest in coordination roles spend the same coordination cost distributed across everyone else’s time. The total cost is higher because the work is done less efficiently by people who are not specialized in coordination. The organization is paying for alignment work either way. The question is whether to pay for it explicitly through dedicated roles or implicitly through productivity loss across everyone.
The Handoff Points Where Context Evaporates
Work passes between people constantly. Designer to engineer. Engineer to QA. Developer to operations. Sales to implementation. Product to marketing. Each handoff is a potential alignment failure.
The person handing off work has context. Why was this done this way? What alternatives were considered? What constraints matter? What is fragile? What needs to change next? This context is in their head. It is not in the artifact being handed off.
The person receiving work lacks this context. They see the output. They do not see the process that produced it. They make decisions based on incomplete information. The decisions are locally rational but systemically wrong because they ignore context that was not transferred.
Organizations implement handoff processes. Documentation requirements. Review meetings. Knowledge transfer sessions. These help but do not eliminate context loss. Writing down context is hard. Reading documentation is slower than doing work. The recipient skips documentation or skim-reads it. Critical context is missed.
The context loss accumulates across handoffs. Designer to engineer loses some context. Engineer to QA loses more context. QA to operations loses more context still. By the time work reaches the end of the chain, the people operating the system do not understand the assumptions that shaped its design.
This manifests as operational fragility. The system works until it encounters a scenario that violates one of the assumptions. The operators do not know the assumptions. They make changes that seem reasonable but break things in subtle ways. The break is discovered later. Someone must trace back through the handoff chain to understand what was assumed and why the change violated it.
This tracing is alignment work. It is reconstructing lost context. It is expensive. It is more expensive than transferring the context in the first place would have been. But the first-order incentive is to minimize handoff time. The cost of context loss is delayed and diffuse. The cost of extended handoffs is immediate and local.
Organizations optimize for fast handoffs and pay the cost in operational incidents, rework, and escalations that require expensive coordination to resolve. The coordination cost is higher but less visible. It looks like normal operational overhead rather than the consequence of inadequate context transfer.
Why Written Communication Scales Better But Happens Less
Verbal communication is synchronous. It requires everyone to be present at the same time. It is expensive in attention cost. It does not scale to large groups. It leaves no artifact for people who were not present.
Written communication is asynchronous. People read at their own pace. It scales to arbitrarily large audiences. It creates an artifact that persists and can be referenced later. It is strictly superior for alignment at scale.
Organizations know this. They encourage written communication. They create documentation cultures. They implement tools for written collaboration. They train people to write more and meet less.
It does not work. People still meet constantly. They still have verbal conversations. They still make decisions in synchronous communication that is not documented.
The reason is effort asymmetry. Writing good documentation is significantly harder than explaining something verbally. Written communication requires clarity, precision, and completeness. Verbal communication tolerates ambiguity because participants can interrupt to ask questions.
Writing requires anticipating what readers will misunderstand and proactively clarifying. Verbal communication allows for misunderstandings to be corrected in real time through dialogue. The cognitive load of writing well is higher than the cognitive load of speaking well.
Most people are not trained writers. They write poorly. Their written communication is ambiguous, incomplete, or unclear. Readers misunderstand. Alignment fails. People revert to meetings because meetings work better than bad documentation.
Good written communication requires editorial skill. It requires understanding of audience. It requires multiple drafts and revision. This is time-consuming. The time investment is front-loaded. The benefit is distributed across all future readers. The incentive is misaligned. The writer pays the cost. The readers capture the benefit.
Organizations that successfully implement written communication cultures do so by explicitly investing in writing skill development and by creating strong norms around documentation quality. These organizations treat writing as a core skill, not as a nice-to-have. They review writing. They provide feedback. They recognize and reward clear communication.
Organizations that simply mandate written communication without building capability see low-quality documentation that does not reduce meeting overhead because the documentation does not actually convey the necessary information.
The Person Who Knows How Everything Connects
Every organization has one or more people who function as information hubs. They are not formally coordinators. They are engineers or product managers or designers who happen to have broad context. They know how different systems relate. They know which teams are working on what. They know where conflicts are likely to emerge.
These people are critical infrastructure. They are the ones who catch misalignments before they become expensive. They are the ones who know to loop in the right people before a decision is finalized. They are the ones who prevent teams from building incompatible solutions.
They perform enormous amounts of invisible alignment work. They answer questions. They connect people. They surface dependencies. They translate between contexts. They maintain mental models of the entire system. This work is untracked and unrecognized. It is just expected.
These people become bottlenecks. Everyone needs their context. They are in every meeting. They are mentioned in every Slack thread. They are the recipients of hundreds of questions per week. They have no time for their nominal job responsibilities. Their entire day is consumed by alignment work.
Organizations do not notice this is a problem until these people quit or go on vacation. Suddenly no one knows how anything connects. Decisions are made without critical context. Teams build conflicting solutions. The coordination infrastructure collapses.
The organization realizes too late that this person was holding everything together. They try to replace them. They cannot. The replacement lacks the context. Building that context takes years. It requires being involved in everything. It requires having an encyclopedic memory of decisions and the reasons for those decisions.
Some organizations respond by creating formal architect or staff engineer roles with explicit responsibility for maintaining system-wide context. This helps but does not fully solve the problem. The role can be created but the context cannot be transferred easily. The person in the role must rebuild the mental model through direct involvement over time.
Organizations that lose their information hub people experience a coordination collapse. Projects that were implicitly coordinated through the hub person are no longer coordinated. The coordination failures manifest slowly. Small misalignments compound into large problems. The cause is invisible because the coordination that was happening was invisible.
The Cost of Alignment That Never Appears in Budgets
Organizations budget for engineering headcount. They budget for design headcount. They budget for product headcount. They budget for tools and infrastructure. They do not budget for alignment work.
Alignment work is funded from productivity loss. When engineers spend 30% of their time in meetings, that is alignment cost. When product managers spend half their week writing specs and documentation, that is alignment cost. When managers spend entire days resolving cross-team conflicts, that is alignment cost.
The cost is real but invisible. It appears as lower throughput. It appears as longer project timelines. It appears as missed deadlines. It does not appear as a line item that can be evaluated.
Organizations do not realize how much they are spending on alignment until they try to measure it. When they track how time is actually spent, they discover that coordination overhead consumes 40% to 60% of total capacity in organizations over a hundred people.
This is shocking if you believe coordination is incidental work. It is not shocking if you understand that coordination is the actual work at scale. The product work is what happens in the gaps between coordination work.
Organizations respond to this realization in different ways. Some accept it as the necessary cost of scale and invest in coordination infrastructure. They hire dedicated coordinators. They invest in better tools. They train people in coordination skills. They design processes that minimize unnecessary coordination while ensuring necessary coordination happens reliably.
Other organizations treat coordination as waste and try to eliminate it. They remove layers of management. They reduce meeting time. They eliminate program managers. They mandate that people spend more time on “real work.”
This second strategy consistently fails. The coordination need does not disappear. The work shifts to informal channels and gets done poorly. Quality degrades. Misalignment increases. Rework multiplies. The productivity loss from poor coordination exceeds the time saved by reducing formal coordination.
Coordination at scale is not optional. Organizations either invest in doing it well or pay more to do it poorly. The choice is not whether to pay the cost. The choice is whether to pay it explicitly through planned coordination or implicitly through chaos and rework.
When Alignment Work Becomes the Constraint on Growth
Organizations can hire faster than they can coordinate. Adding headcount is a budgeting decision. Adding coordination capacity is a capability building exercise.
A company decides to grow from 100 engineers to 200 engineers. They run a recruiting process. They hire 100 engineers over six months. They have doubled headcount. They have not doubled coordination capacity.
The new engineers must be integrated. They must learn the codebase, the architecture, the processes, the culture, the informal norms. This learning requires coordination. Existing engineers must spend time onboarding, reviewing code, answering questions, correcting misunderstandings.
The time existing engineers spend on integration is time not spent building. The productivity of the existing team declines. The new team is not yet productive. Net productivity drops in the short term and recovers slowly as the new engineers come up to speed.
Meanwhile, communication overhead has increased. 200 engineers have more communication paths than 100 engineers. More meetings. More documentation. More Slack messages. More email. More everything.
The organization expected to double output. Instead, output increases by 30% while coordination overhead doubles. The rest of the capacity is consumed by the alignment work necessary to keep 200 people from building in conflicting directions.
Organizations hit a coordination wall. They cannot grow faster without proportionally growing coordination capability. But coordination capability does not scale linearly with headcount. It requires new roles, new processes, new tools, new skills. Building this infrastructure takes time.
Companies that grow too fast collapse under coordination overhead. Teams duplicate work. Projects conflict. Quality suffers. The organization becomes structurally incapable of converting headcount into output because all available capacity is consumed by keeping people aligned.
This is the hidden constraint on scaling. Not hiring capacity. Not budget. Not market opportunity. Coordination capacity. The ability to keep an increasingly large number of people working toward compatible goals without constant collision.
Organizations that grow sustainably grow their coordination capacity in parallel with their headcount. They invest in managers, program managers, technical leads, documentation, communication infrastructure, and processes that reduce unnecessary coordination while ensuring necessary coordination happens efficiently.
Organizations that fail to do this experience growth that becomes its own dysfunction. More people, less output, higher frustration, degraded culture, increased attrition. The growth meant to scale the business instead scales the chaos.
Distinguishing Necessary Alignment From Coordination Theater
Not all alignment work is necessary. Some alignment work is organizational theater. Meetings that exist because meetings are expected. Status reports that no one reads. Documentation that no one maintains. Approval processes that do not improve decisions.
Distinguishing necessary alignment from theater requires asking what would happen if the alignment work were not done. If the answer is that work would be misaligned and problems would result, the alignment is necessary. If the answer is that nothing would happen differently, the alignment is theater.
A cross-team sync that surfaces dependencies and prevents conflicts is necessary. A recurring status meeting where everyone reports what they are working on but no coordination occurs is theater.
Writing documentation that enables new team members to onboard faster is necessary. Writing documentation that satisfies a policy but is never read is theater.
A planning process that ensures resources are allocated to the right priorities is necessary. A planning process that produces detailed plans that are immediately obsolete is theater.
Organizations accumulate coordination theater over time. Each piece is added for a reason. The reason may no longer apply but the practice persists. No one questions whether it is still necessary. It is just what we do.
Removing coordination theater requires active effort. It requires asking whether each alignment activity produces coordination value proportional to its cost. It requires accepting that some activities that feel like good practices are actually overhead.
Organizations that regularly prune coordination theater can operate with lower overhead. They can redirect capacity from theater to actual coordination or to actual work. This requires discipline. It requires saying no to activities that seem like they should happen but do not produce value.
Organizations that accumulate coordination theater without pruning experience steadily increasing overhead for decreasing coordination benefit. Eventually, they are spending more time on alignment activities than on the work being aligned, but the alignment activities are not producing actual alignment.
The result is organizations where everyone is busy coordinating but nothing is actually coordinated. Where meetings consume entire days but decisions remain unclear. Where documentation is extensive but accuracy is low. Where process is rigorous but outcomes are chaotic.
The alignment work is happening. It is just not working. The organization is paying full coordination cost for minimal coordination benefit. This is the worst possible outcome. Not lean operations. Not effective coordination. Just expensive theater that looks like coordination but fails to produce it.