The Coordination Tax: Why You’re Stuck in Synchronisation Hell

This is part 4 of a 5-part series on why Agile alone isn't enough.

As delivery scales, so does coordination.

What begins as healthy collaboration across a few teams can quickly turn into a web of meetings, approvals, dependencies, and shared decisions.

And before long, the organisation feels like it’s spending more time aligning around the work than actually doing it.

The cost of unclear interfaces

Most teams don’t set out to over-coordinate, but when ownership is distributed and boundaries are unclear, coordination becomes the default safety net.

We set up syncs “just to stay aligned.”

We create shared documents, shared roadmaps, and shared backlogs.

We try to keep everyone in the loop, because no one’s quite sure who’s responsible for what.

The intent is good, but the outcome is friction or awkward team interactions. Every conversation becomes a checkpoint. Every small change requires consensus.

The cost of making a decision grows until momentum disappears entirely.

Agile can amplify the coordination tax

Agile encourages collaboration, shared understanding, and regular feedback. However, without clearly defined team responsibilities and intentional interaction modes, those practices scale horizontally across every team connected to the work.

Instead of improving flow, you get process inflation.

More refinement sessions, more cross-team planning, more meetings to coordinate the meetings. All the time, trying to manage dependencies rather than minimise them.

This isn’t about working harder, it’s about working with clearer boundaries

You can’t resolve systemic coordination issues through willpower or goodwill.

You need to revisit the structure:

• Who owns what?

• What needs to be decided jointly, and what doesn’t?

• Where can we reduce the number of interaction points through better team design?

Team Topologies offers useful language here by framing what we mean by Collaboration, Facilitating, and X-as-a-service interactions.

Collaboration and facilitation should be short-lived and purposeful, with a clear intent of the desired outcome often resulting in an X-as-a-service interaction.

X-as-a-service should be a longer-lived interaction that enables self-service from consuming teams without needing handovers. However, these should be monitored over time to ensure they are still relevant.

We don't want every relationship to be collaborative all the time, collaboration is expensive after all.

Useful questions to reflect on

“What decisions regularly stall while we wait for alignment?”

“Which teams are in too many meetings, and why?”

“Are we collaborating because we need to, or because we haven’t agreed how not to?”

Reducing the coordination tax isn’t about doing less together.

It’s about doing the right things together and creating the conditions for others to move independently, with confidence.

In the next and final article in this series, I explore the need to create an environment for change.

If you're having issues like this in your org and would like some help, DM me or comment below, and I'll contact you if appropriate.