Work Begins Strong

People join teams to create. People like building things. Small groups ignite fast. Teams start strong. New teammates gather, share an idea for what’s possible, and launch real work built from back-and-forth exploration, shared vision, and a real sense of moving forward together. For a while, each member holds tightly to the same direction, fueling progress with every conversation.

Alignment and Realignment are Part of Learning

As work unfolds, everyone starts turning ideas over in their heads. Excitement drives action, and action launches new directions. Some directions are explicit, others are more sneaky. Individuals drift and, through conversation and constraint, teams pull back into alignment. This iterative realigning is the heartbeat of creative work. But as teams get bigger, recalibration gets harder. New voices, new perspectives, and new interpretations create more opportunity. Existing voices fall more and more into a set direction. Falling out of sync is inevitable. The challenge in scaling is that the mechanism for caring and aligning grows complex and unwieldy. It becomes harder and harder to keep people in the loop when there are many loops.

Scaling as an Opportunity

Team misalignment or drift at scale becomes failure when we don’t have a system to keep us sharing information and direction in a healthy way. In the Toxic Waste class and in the upcoming book, we talk about this as an inevitable tax of having passionate, smart people eager to build, create, and contribute. Weirdly many alignment issues are proof of enthusiasm, not error. Most organizations never anticipate or design for the comms burden that comes with growth. No one ever budgets for the fact that, beyond a certain size, realignment is a system that must be intentionally architected, not left to chance. It’s a cornerstone of strategy and culture.

Communication Breakdown are Unseen Silos

In the beginning, conversation is effortless and low cost. The daily chatter that aligns small teams becomes expected, taken for granted. With growth this same chatter becomes invisible, then expensive, then impossible. Bottlenecks and silos are created by us simply getting poor information or direction and then needing to say “What?” over and over again. Everything needs to be analyzed. This makes every one of us a silo, every one of us a bottleneck.

In the call we discussed communications with the “lorry rule” where in the past, the truck (information) arrived to deliver a sofa (soft and easy to use), now it has become a runaway truck (or fleet) of urgent information headed toward you at great speed (dangerous and bewildering). When this happens, people retain their will to succeed…they still want to get the work done). With the overload, they lose their ability to work together effectively. This leads people in management to assume the people aren’t working effectively. The reality here is that the communications system has not grown with the complexity of the company.

We Can Fix This

At the risk of becoming overly geeky...this is straight up Conways Law.

Conway’s Law says systems are designed to mirror the communication structures of the organizations that create them, meaning a product’s architecture will reflect team boundaries and ways of working.

Conway’s Law is that if your company’s internal communications are confused, combative, or otherwise crappy it will drive your culture, work, and products much more than your frameworks or product plans.

We’d like to avoid crappy product, frankly. So let’s try to fix this very repeated pattern (I’ve seen it a lot). These breakdowns aren’t terminal. They are fixable. We just need to acknowledge that this happens and that people want to do good work. They don’t want to interrupted, redirected, or confused.

Companies (people working in the company of others) need to build systems that allow conversation, recalibration, and distributed decision-making to happen smoothly. Information needs to be provided predictably. Work alignment is not a one-time event but a continual, shared commitment. And the unexpected is met with a known, implementable, and reassuring process.

The best groups treat each misalignment as a signal, not an annoyance, to evolve how they communicate as they grow. In doing this, they maintain the culture they love and create products the customer does too.

Practical Steps for Scaling Collaboration

* Recognize that scaling is building and maintaining communication architecture. (If you don’t you aren’t scaling, you are bloating).

* Underwrite and expect moments of realignment.

* Make communication agreements explicit, revisable, and visible. Make them daily work.

* Acknowledge growth as a force multiplier for creativity and complexity. (Balance them)

* Bottlenecks arise often, look for excitement and direction beneath the surface. Deal with bottlenecks quickly to avoid bureaucracy.

Final Reflection:I love these conversations each month. This week we discussed how people want to create, build, and make a difference in the context of how we stop people from doing exactly those things. Growing pains sneak up on you and feel like defeat. In the group, we felt the defeat and the challenges behind that defeat. We commiserated and then said, “What do we do to fix this.”

If you recognize yourself, past or present, in this situation, leave a comment.

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