Case in point: The 2018 investigations into Boeing's 737 MAX crashes revealed a structural coordination failure spanning engineering, regulatory affairs, and program management. The Seattle engineering team and the Boeing executive team in Chicago were separated by organization, incentive structure, and physical distance. The FAA's delegated inspection model compounded this: certification work was done by Boeing employees under FAA oversight, which required close coordination between groups with misaligned incentives. When the MCAS system anomaly appeared in flight data, the coordination failure between engineering judgment and regulatory communication delayed the grounding by over a year after the first crash. The formal reporting structure existed; the coordination system did not.

At some point in every growing organization, a new meeting gets created. Then another. Then a Slack channel to coordinate the meetings. Then a program manager to coordinate the channel. Then a steering committee to oversee the program manager.

No one sets out to build a bureaucracy. It accumulates one reasonable patch at a time.

Coordination is not the enemy. Bad coordination is. Legitimate interdependence needs coordination. Executive control theater does not.

When Coordination Is a Symptom

When two teams coordinate constantly. If Team A and Team B need each other every week to ship routine work, ask whether they should be one team, one value stream, or at least under one accountable leader. Constant coordination is often a team-boundary smell.

When one team blocks many. If every initiative waits on the same data, platform, security, design, or analytics group, the answer may not be "better prioritization." That group may need to become a proper platform or shared service with intake rules, capacity planning, SLAs, and product management of its own.

When embedded roles have two bosses. Embedded analysts, designers, security partners, finance partners, and HRBPs often live in a matrix. That can work, but only if priority conflicts have a named owner. If the functional leader and business leader both set priorities, the embedded person becomes the coordination mechanism — and burns out accordingly.

When information travels up to come back down. If Team A needs information from Team B and the path is A → manager → director → director → manager → B, the meeting is not the issue. The information architecture is.

How to Escape It

Audit coordination forums. List every recurring cross-functional meeting, steering committee, sync, and review. For each one: what decision does it make, who owns it, what metric would get worse if it disappeared? If the answers are vague, cut or redesign it.

Push decisions to the lowest level with enough context. Cross-functional does not mean committee-owned. It means one owner needs input from multiple functions before deciding.

Redesign team boundaries around work. Reduce the number of teams a normal workflow must cross. If you cannot reduce the crossings, make the interface explicit: intake, SLA, decision rights, escalation path, and capacity tradeoffs.

Separate coordination from control. Some forums exist because executives want visibility. Fine. Call them business reviews, not decision meetings. Do not force operators to confuse reporting upward with making progress.