Main idea

When the direction to follow hasn't been arbitrated, the work doesn't stop: it gets compensated. Teams multiply the check-ins, the cross-validations, the follow-ups, the alignment meetings. That activity produces nothing new; it holds together, by hand and continuously, what nobody was willing to settle once.

This cost has two features that make it hard to see. It is spread out — a few hours a week across many people rather than an identifiable loss on a given date. And it looks like good practice: nobody criticizes an organization that coordinates, even though the amount of coordination required is the symptom of the missing decision.

The resulting fatigue is therefore not the fatigue of the work, it is that of maintaining a contradiction.

Layer added by "The Tools of Organizational Coherence" (2026-09-15). The expense isn't only suffered, it is often decided: faced with a lack of alignment, an organization's spontaneous answer is to add meetings, committees and cross-validations. The remedy therefore takes the exact shape of the symptom, which explains why it never recognizes itself as one. And that repeated coordination is one of the forms a cost of delay takes: paying by the hour, spread out, for what one decision would have settled once.

Why it matters

This gives an observable indicator where the cost of a weak consensus looked impossible to quantify: the volume of coordination rituals a subject requires in order to move.

It also changes how you read requests to "communicate better": adding a weekly check-in to a badly arbitrated subject increases the spend without reducing the cause.

Nuances and limits

Part of coordination is irreducible: autonomous teams working on the same product need to talk to each other, even when everything has been settled.

And the indicator is ambiguous in highly matrixed organizations, where the volume of meetings is high for structural reasons, regardless of the quality of arbitrations.

Open questions

• How do you distinguish, within a team's coordination time, the irreducible part from the part compensating for a decision not made?