Because coordination is expensive - Surfing Complexity

Large organizations constantly face questions about slow movement, silos, meeting overload, duplicated solutions, and too many management layers. The article argues that all of these stem from the fundamental expense of coordination: the more people involved, the more effort and time required to align work.

Coordination isn't just abstract friction; it shows up as meetings that feel like work, duplicated workflow systems, and the temptation to standardize locally rather than across the whole company. The piece cites real examples-from the "One SendGrid" campaign to the proliferation of tools like Jira, Slack, and Gantt charts-demonstrating how organizations pour resources into glue work without rewarding it directly.

Historical attempts to cut coordination costs, such as Google's short-lived experiment without engineering managers and Zappos' holacracy, are highlighted to show that the problem is structural, not solved by a single trick. Amazon's federation model and Google's heavy investment in centralized tooling illustrate two divergent strategies, each still grappling with the same underlying cost.

During incidents, companies invest in dedicated incident managers to tame acute coordination spikes, but chronic coordination remains under-addressed. The article urges leaders to treat meetings as real work, improve their effectiveness, and recognize the value of glue work that keeps the organization moving.