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Coordination debt is real.
It affects organizations in the way oxygen debt affects athletes: at first, invisible, then suddenly—a strain. Before long, it’s a struggle for breath, followed by a rapid breakdown in performance.
Like any debt, its effect is insidious—gradually wearing down groups until the cracks are too big to ignore.
The chronic stress of coordination debt leads to a sense of helplessness across teams. It breeds strained relationships for individuals—a lack of trust, a reduced sense of autonomy, and decision fatigue.
Unfortunately, coordination debt is natural as businesses grow.
Much like the sleep debt a parent accrues from looking after their newborn, coordination debt results from a positive thing. Growth. Which demands another positive thing—delegation.
To get work done at scale, we divide it into smaller chunks—by project, operation, and geography. Projects roll up into a roadmap, with functions—marketing, sales, product, and technology—prioritizing their own—sometimes competing— goals.
Specialization creates silos.
Geographic splits add another layer of complexity: sales teams focus on the nuances of the North East, while those in the South West operate differently. Best practices fragment. Over time, it becomes hard to tell the difference between a needless nuance and a necessary one—our attempts to grease the gears of business paradoxically gum it up.
Teams, naturally, focus on their work and ensure their part works. But friction between teams turns into small gaps, and small gaps in coordination quickly grow into full-blown silos.
At first, these gaps might seem manageable, even normal—decisions are made; work gets done—but as missed moments and poor communication pile up, the cracks begin to show. Misaligned goals, duplicated efforts, and dark deployments become the organizational equivalent of gasping for air.
The harder you try to move forward, the more resistance you face.
It’s not just coordination debt that calcifies the organization. Technical debt, process debt, and coordination debt all weigh heavily on a balance sheet. Together, they’re an invisible force—an organizational gravity—that slows change, swallows collaboration, and toxifies culture.
Closing the gap starts with understanding where it comes from.
Here are six main culprits of coordination debt.
#1. Structural cracks.
#2. Process inefficiencies.
#3. Collaborative overload.
#4. Cultural erosion.
#5. Scaling pains.
#6. Disconnected systems.
Recognizing which root cause your debt stems from is crucial. You need to unpick the tangle of hidden costs. Only then can you move forward—fixing performance, aligning work with strategy, and cultivating culture.
Ironically, dividing work to do work builds debt.
Teams chase their own objectives without considering how their work impacts others. It’s a kneejerk reaction to speed and urgency—‘it’s easier if I do it myself’—that creates its organizational twin: silos.
Over time, this leads to conflicting priorities and duplicated efforts.
Work in one area may unintentionally block progress in another. Without alignment, teams often don’t realize they’re slowing others down—or worse, different groups unknowingly tackle the same goal in isolation, wasting valuable resources.
Ask yourself: Are your teams siloed? Look for:
When overloaded, all mechanisms underperform.
The very effort to go faster creates friction that slows progress. Delays, rework, and confusion spread through unclear ownership, ambiguous handoffs, and labyrinthine workflows. Operational drag takes over.
At the root of the problem, complexity masquerades as process.
Unclear ownership of decisions—CYA—blurs into bureaucracy with too many cooks in the kitchen. Multiple hand-offs with ambiguous inputs and outputs create bottlenecks, leaving tasks adrift. Wooly communication leads to ‘dark deployments’—projects launched without full alignment, resulting in crossed wires and missed objectives.
When processes frustrate, people bypass them. Workarounds multiply, creating inefficiency on top of inefficiency, leaving teams stuck in a cycle of rework and delays.
Ask yourself: Do your processes flow—or frustrate? Look for:
The act of collaboration requires work.
And that work can be overwhelming. Demand outpaces capacity. Leaders shuffle between too many direct reports; trading time spent driving outcomes for constant coordination. Endless check-ins and updates pile up—a murder of meetings.
Firefighting becomes the order of the day.
Reactive tasks overshadow the strategic. Leaders feel stretched thin, caught in a loop of decision-making that leaves little room for deeper thinking. Time disappears, energy fades, and priorities blur. Teams lose sight of their goals, buried beneath the weight of perpetual coordination.
Ask yourself: Is your collaboration driving outcomes—or dragging you down? Look for:
Over time, coordination debt becomes a collective habit.
You hear it in a quiet mantra: “This is just how we do things around here.” Information is kept close for fear of criticism, eroding trust. Communication falters as misalignment and misunderstandings take root.
Morale takes a hit.
Distrust and constant rework stifle creativity. Employees eventually check out—they stop sharing ideas or raising concerns, worried they’ll only add to the noise. Great ideas stay locked away, progress feels out of reach, and the culture stagnates.
Ask yourself: Is your culture helping or hurting progress? Look for:
Rapid growth brings excitement—and exhaustion.
As your company stretches to meet new demands, systems, and processes that once worked begin to buckle. Teams resort to patchwork solutions, duct-taping workflows that no longer fit today’s needs.
The strain shows fast.
New employees struggle to find their footing, slowed by unclear workflows and outdated tools. Communication becomes a game of broken telephone as scaling efforts outpace the systems meant to support them. Without scalable systems, every step forward feels like a scramble to keep up. Teams are running harder but going nowhere.
Ask yourself: Are systems stretching or snapping under pressure? Look for:
In the chaos of disconnected systems, fragmentation reigns.
Picture a designer juggling six tools to complete one project—exporting data from one system, cleaning it up in another, and uploading it to a third for approval. Updates are tracked in a spreadsheet, and emails coordinate the next steps; critical information gets lost in the shuffle.
Instead of making life easier, tools tangle workflows into knots.
This leaves teams scrambling to bridge gaps. Efficiency takes a nosedive. Time is wasted toggling between platforms, copying and pasting data, and chasing down updates.
Ask yourself: Do your tools work for you or against you? Look for:
If you’re struggling with coordination debt, one or more of these culprits is likely at its heart, disarmed with well-intentioned commentary: “We’ll figure it out as we go,” or, “We’re just moving fast.” Until the roots dig deeper—stalling decisions, growing silos, and spreading frustration.
Uncover and address those roots before they take hold and choke progress.
Gavin McMahon is a founder and Chief Content Officer for fassforward consulting group. He leads Learning Design and Product development across fassforward’s range of services. This crosses diverse topics, including Leadership, Culture, Decision-making, Information design, Storytelling, and Customer Experience. He is also a contributor to Forbes Business Council.
Eugene Yoon is a graphic designer and illustrator at fassforward. She is a crafter of Visual Logic. Eugene is multifaceted and works on various types of projects, including but not limited to product design, UX and web design, data visualization, print design, advertising, and presentation design.
