Postcards from the Field: Speed and Coordination

Postcards from the Field is where I share brief field reports from my work with real leadership teams. Rather than polished case studies, these notes surface the moments that stop me mid-session and point to the everyday habits that shape performance when conditions are uncertain. My aim is to translate what I’m seeing in the field into practical value readers can apply in their own teams.

The day before I was scheduled to open a conference in San Francisco, I checked into my hotel, dropped my bags, and started running through my keynote one last time.

After an hour of rehearsal, I realized I was hungry. I ordered dinner from a delivery app and went back to refining slides. 

A little while later, my room phone rang.

A recorded message informed me that my food had arrived in the lobby and that the hotel’s hospitality robot would be delivering it to my room.

I laughed out loud.

A few minutes later, the doorbell rang. When I opened the door, a small delivery robot was waiting outside with my dinner sealed inside a compartment.

Every time I work in San Francisco, I seem to encounter some small glimpse of the future. This trip was no exception.

The next morning, I was scheduled to open a conference for employee experience, workplace culture, and HR leaders. Much of the event would focus on AI and the future of work. 

As I ate my dinner and thought about the robot rolling down the hallway, I found myself wondering what I could possibly say to this audience that would feel both timely and useful.

The answer I kept returning to surprised me.

The closer we get to a future defined by intelligent tools, automation, and increasingly capable AI systems, the more important the fundamentals of teamwork may become.

During the keynote, I used a metaphor that kept resurfacing as I worked on the talk: sand in the gears.

For years, organizations have been accumulating small forms of friction. Work has become increasingly cross-functional. Teams are spread across locations, time zones, and reporting lines. More people have input into decisions. More projects require coordination across multiple groups. More work moves through a web of handoffs before it reaches completion.

None of this is new.

The sand was already there.

A priority that isn’t quite clear. A decision whose owner is ambiguous. A concern that gets raised too late. A handoff that requires multiple conversations before everyone understands what is needed. A team that spends more time coordinating work than doing it.

Most organizations have learned to live with these challenges. In fact, many teams have become remarkably good at compensating for them. They add another meeting. They schedule another check-in. They work a little harder. They rely on talented people to fill the gaps.

What is changing is the speed.

A task that once took hours can now take minutes. A first draft can appear almost instantly. Analysis that previously required significant effort can be generated in moments. Work is beginning to move through organizations at a pace that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.

The promise is greater speed. The challenge is that speed amplifies friction.

If the gears are clean, speed creates momentum. If there is sand in the system, speed creates heat.

What many leaders are experiencing right now is not simply the pressure of moving faster. It is the realization that producing work is becoming easier, while coordinating work remains just as hard.

New technology can help a team generate ideas, analyze data, write code, summarize information, and create first drafts at remarkable speed. But every piece of work still requires people to decide what matters most, make tradeoffs, clarify ownership, surface concerns, and coordinate action across the team.

The sand isn’t in the work itself. It’s in the moments where people need to coordinate around the work.

In many organizations, those coordination moments are becoming the limiting factor. Work can now move through the system incredibly fast, but every step still depends on people making sense of what they are seeing and deciding what happens next. Does everyone understand the priority? Who owns the decision? Is a concern being raised early enough? Does another team need to be involved? Has the work crossed a threshold where the original plan no longer makes sense.

Technology can accelerate the production of work. It cannot replace the coordination habits that help people move that work forward together.

As I left the conference, I found myself carrying a few questions home.

If producing work becomes dramatically easier, what becomes the new bottleneck?

What coordination habits will teams need to strengthen as work accelerates?

And are we investing enough attention in those habits, or are we assuming technology will solve problems that are fundamentally human?

I’d love to hear what you’re seeing. Where is the sand in your team’s gears?