Sticky Coordination Headwinds

What is it?

The daily grind begins at work: You possess a small piece of information, a simple truth, a ready answer. Yet, broadcasting it outright poses a risk. Each node—each person, each department—is a potential source of disagreement, a potential veto. That person might be on your annual review committee and disagree. They are all interconnected. Thus, you query the network. The goal is not confirmation but preemption. The aim is to collect all possible objections and diffuse responsibility. You send out feelers, probes, soft suggestions, never a definitive declaration. Each message functions as an implicit request for consensus, a plea for prior approval. This transforms the network into a perpetually unsettled ledger. No one commits. No one finalizes.

Coordination headwind describes the systemic friction organizations encounter as scale increases, impeding efficient action. When fear drives consensus, this friction becomes a paralyzing force.

What does it feel like?

The result: a torrent of non-committal pings. "Thoughts on this?" "Any concerns if we…?" "Just seeking alignment." This communication strategy, born of self-preservation, generates a blizzard of low-signal traffic. Consistency is indeed "eventual," but the "eventual" part disappears over the horizon. The network becomes a state machine perpetually seeking a stable state it cannot achieve, because any node attempting to force that state faces active resistance or, worse, passive silence.

And eventual removal from the cultural antibodies: The others have evolved a way to stay alive in the consensus coordination game, and you are upsetting their game.

Working in such a system is both (a) franticly busy and (b) low on output. The gridlock is effectively total: New situations arise faster than they can be responded to.

What do you do?

I don’t really know. Individuals caught in this stasis face a stark choice: escape or stagnation. For individuals, "oblique strategies" might involve identifying adjacent problems where unilateral action, however small, delivers clear value, thereby bypassing the primary consensus bottleneck. But that might not exist.

Or, focus on building small, trusted micro-networks within the larger, dysfunctional graph—nodes that can commit. For managers, the task is to carve out protected spaces. Define small scopes with clear decision rights. Isolate small teams from the main consensus-seeking network. Champion direct, irreversible action within these controlled domains. The goal is to prove that "commit" operations can occur, and that value follows. Note that this is hard, and risky for the manager. You’re still upsetting the game, just at the management level.