Most organizations have a collaboration problem they don’t know how to name.
It’s not that people don’t want to collaborate. It’s not that they lack communication tools. It’s not even that they’re fundamentally bad at working together.
The problem is this: their systems for collaboration don’t exist.
And when systems don’t exist, good intentions fail. Brilliant people get frustrated. Innovation stalls. And, most tragically, talented people walk out the door, leaving organizations to wonder what went wrong.
We’ve watched this pattern play out across companies from 50 to 500+ employees. The specifics vary. The core dynamics don’t.
The Pattern We Keep Seeing
Let me introduce you to Sarah. She’s a product team lead at a mid-sized tech company. She’s smart, driven, and genuinely cares about the mission of the organization.
Last quarter, her team needed to deliver additional value -customer onboarding improvement.
This required coordination across five different systems: the onboarding platform itself, authentication (owned by Platform team), billing (owned by Operations), three external integrations (each owned by different engineers).
Sarah’s team hit a dependency wall in week three. They needed something from Ops. They had asked, what was believed to be clearly. But the request got lost. Not because the Ops lead was negligent. Not because Sarah communicated poorly. But because there was no forum where cross-functional dependencies surface and get resolved proactively.
By the time anyone realized there was a problem, three weeks had passed. The delay cascaded. A customer demo moved. A contract renewal moved. An engineer started interviewing elsewhere.
Here’s what Sarah told us: “Nobody did anything wrong. That’s the infuriating part. We all did our jobs. But we did them in silos. And the system just… doesn’t have a way to break down silos proactively.”
Why This Matters (Beyond the Anecdote)
Communication breakdowns cost U.S. companies approximately 18% of total salaries paid, roughly $12,500 per employee annually. For a 100-person organization with $60k average salaries, that’s $1.25 million in annual losses.
Workplace conflict (much of which stems from collaboration failures) costs the U.S. economy $359 billion annually. Employees spend 2.8 hours per week, nearly 2.5 weeks per year, navigating disputes and unclear responsibilities instead of executing work.
Disengagement (closely correlated with feeling unsupported and unclear about organizational direction) costs organizations 34% of each employee’s annual salary in lost productivity.
And then there’s turnover. Replacing an employee costs 50-200% of their annual salary depending on role complexity. But the real cost – institutional knowledge loss, client relationship disruption, team morale impact – often isn’t measured.
Organizations are hemorrhaging value not because they hired wrong, but because the structure for how people work together doesn’t support how work actually needs to happen.
The Three Systems That Collaboration Actually Requires
We’ve studied organizations that do collaborate effectively, alongside those that struggle. The difference isn’t culture or nice intentions.
The difference is systems.
Specifically, three types of systems need to exist:
1. Decision-Making Architecture
How do decisions actually get made in your organization?
Most organizations can’t answer this clearly. There are official processes (which people barely follow) and shadow processes (which actually run the place). When you have both, teams default to whichever one seems faster, which means different teams use different frameworks. Which creates misalignment.
Effective organizations have clarity on:
- What types of decisions require what level of input
- Who should be in the room (and when)
- How disagreement gets surfaced and resolved
- Who decides when consensus can’t be reached
- How decisions get communicated to people who need to execute them
This isn’t bureaucracy. This is clarity. And clarity enables speed.
2. Cross-Functional Forums
Work today is inherently cross-functional. No one person, no one team, can complete meaningful work in isolation.
But most organizations don’t have structured forums for:
- Surfacing dependencies before they become crises
- Escalating conflicts that teams can’t resolve locally
- Sharing context about decisions so that teams understand the “why”
- Identifying problems that span multiple departments
- Building relationships and understanding across team lines
Without these forums, problems get worse before they’re visible. Context doesn’t flow. Resentment builds.
Effective organizations have regular, structured cross-functional meetings where the explicit purpose is: “What are we learning about our constraints? What dependencies are emerging? What decisions do we need to make together?”
These are different from standup meetings. They’re different from all-hands. They’re designed specifically for the work of coordination.
3. Psychological Safety Infrastructure
This is harder to systematize, but it’s maybe the most important.
Psychological safety, the belief that you can take interpersonal risks without fear of negative social consequences, doesn’t just happen because you declare it a value.
It happens when:
- Dissent is actively sought, not tolerated
- Mistakes are treated as information, not failures
- People see that their concerns are actually heard and acted upon
- Vulnerability is modeled by leadership
- Small failures are surfaced immediately so they don’t become large failures
- There are explicit forums for “what’s actually going on” conversations
Without psychological safety infrastructure, people suppress concerns. They work around problems instead of flagging them. They leave instead of speaking up.
With it, organizations learn fast. They course-correct faster. They keep talented people because those people feel genuinely heard.
What This Actually Looks Like In Practice
Let me take you to an organization that got this right.
This company—call them TechCorp—was struggling with the same problem. Smart team. Mounting frustration. Talent leaving.
Their CEO, after listening to enough exit interviews, realized something: “We’re not a “communication problem”. We’re a “decision-making problem”. We don’t have a shared understanding of how we actually make decisions.”
So they did something both simple and radical: they designed their decision-making framework.
They identified twelve types of decisions their organization makes regularly. For each type, they documented:
- Who has expertise (should be in the room)
- Who will execute (must be in the room)
- Who is affected (should be consulted)
- Who decides (if consensus fails)
They established a rhythm of cross-functional coordination meetings (one hour, twice per week) where the explicit purpose was: “What are we learning about our dependencies, constraints, and misalignments?”
They created “what’s actually happening” conversations monthly at a team level, where the explicit norm was: “Tell us what concerns you that we’re not addressing. What would make your job better? What’s frustrating you that you haven’t mentioned?”
They didn’t eliminate meetings. They made their meetings intentional.
Within six months:
- Time spent in unproductive conflicts dropped 60%
- Cross-team dependencies were surfaced and resolved 3 weeks earlier in projects
- Employee engagement scores increased 23%
- Voluntary turnover dropped from 18% to 8% annually
- Time-to-deliver for cross-functional features decreased 35%
Not because they hired better people. Because they built better conditions for people to work together.
Why This Is Hard (And Why Organizations Avoid It)
Building decision-making architecture is unglamorous work.
It doesn’t get you press coverage. It doesn’t promise overnight culture transformation. It requires leadership to sit down and design how decisions actually get made instead of hoping good intentions will suffice.
Most organizations avoid it because:
- It requires seeing the system as broken – Which is uncomfortable. Everyone (typically) is doing their best.
- It demands clarity about power and decision-making – Which is easier to leave ambiguous.
- It’s boring to implement – No inspirational keynotes. No team offsites. Just: meeting structure, documented frameworks, training on a process.
- It exposes where leadership has been unclear – Which is vulnerable.
But here’s the thing: organizations that skip this work pay a hidden tax in every quarter. Slower execution. Higher turnover. Lower innovation. Frustrated talented people.
Organizations that do this work get faster, smarter, more human.
Three Starting Questions For Your Organization
If you’re wondering whether your organization has this problem:
1. Can you articulate, clearly and consistently, how decisions get made at three different levels? (Strategic decisions, tactical decisions, operational decisions)
If three people in your leadership team give three different answers, that’s a signal.
2. Do you have explicit forums where cross-functional problems surface before they become crises?
If people are discovering dependency issues in retros or in escalations, that’s a signal.
3. When people express concerns, do they see those concerns actually acted upon?
If your culture survey shows high engagement except on “my concerns are heard,” that’s a signal.
If any of these resonate, you don’t have a people problem. You have a system problem. And system problems are fixable.
What To Do About It
Start here:
- Pick one key decision type that creates repeated friction in your organization. (Could be “how we prioritize our roadmap,” “how we handle customer escalations,” “how we allocate resources”)
- Bring together the people who make that decision and the people who execute it. Ask: “How do we actually make this decision today? Who should be involved? Where does it go wrong?”
- Document the current reality – not the ideal, the actual. What’s the process people actually follow?
- Compare it to what needs to happen for the decision to be made well and communicated clearly.
- Design the improvement. Not a new process that’s perfect on paper. But one that’s honest about how your organization actually works.
- Build in feedback loops. Check in six weeks later. What’s working? What’s still broken?
This is conditions-based thinking applied to organizational design. And here’s what we’ve learned: when you design the conditions for collaboration instead of just exhorting people to collaborate, everything changes.
People don’t leave because they’re ungrateful. They leave because the system is breaking them.
But when the system supports them? When there are clear forums for collaboration, clear decision-making frameworks, and explicit psychological safety infrastructure?
Then something remarkable happens: people stop trying to work around the system. And they start actually moving together.
This blog post was written by Michael Nagorski.
Ready to diagnose your team’s collaboration challenges? Let’s have a conversation.
Contact Mike directly through LinkedIn or through our website.