AI is giving us a chance to fix something we broke decades ago. The technology does make work easier, certainly. But the real opportunity runs deeper than that. For the first time in a generation, the logic of how we organize work could actually shift. We might finally have reason to invest in the teams we’ve been treating as temporary. The question is whether we see it.
A marketing team spent six weeks getting website copy approved. Simple stuff—hero text, product pages. They had research. They had A/B tests. The new version beat the old by a mile.
It should’ve taken thirty minutes. One VP tried to reopen the brand narrative “while we’re here.” Another asked for three alternatives “to show the range of options.” Someone wanted device mockups even though only the words needed approval. Another requested a competitive analysis with no bearing on the decision.
By week four, the deck grew from six slides to thirty-two. The final approval looked like what they started with. The only thing that changed was how exhausted everyone felt.
Coordination is the weight. AI just gave us a chance to lift it—and most teams are reading the opportunity backwards.
The reflex is to go lean. AI raises individual capability, so use fewer people. Hire fractional executives. Bring in specialist contractors. Stay flexible.
Here’s what it does: you don’t reduce coordination—you redistribute it. Each person left manages more external relationships—vendors, contractors, part-time specialists who don’t know your context. The load spreads. The price rises. Contractors bring portable domain depth, not embedded context. You start from zero trust every time.
Specialization made sense when scarce expertise set the pace. AI changed the floor. Now a PM can model and analyze; an engineer can draft strategy; a designer can write serviceable code. None of it is perfect. It’s good enough to keep moving. The constraint isn’t capability. It’s whether people can move together.
But here’s the problem we don’t talk about:
Your team is full of high performers who excel at self-imposed difficulty. Ultramarathons. Cold plunges. Personal optimization everywhere.
These people have discipline. What they lack is coordination capacity.
Three differences matter:
- Control vs. Constraint: The ultramarathon? You chose it, trained for it, can quit if injured. Team coordination? Life assigns you the teammate, the timing, the crisis. There’s no opt-out when Q4 projections collapse.
- Individual vs. Interdependent: The cold plunge? A solo metric, a personal achievement. You control all variables. Coordination requires accommodation, repair, and working through someone else’s priorities.
- Achievement vs. Bonding: Voluntary hardship gives you a dopamine hit from completion. Visible progress, clear finish lines. Sustained coordination requires trust from shared struggle, often with unclear timelines.
The result: teams of individually impressive people who fragment at the first real coordination challenge. They break not from lack of talent, but from lack of practice coordinating under involuntary pressure.
This is a structural problem that AI just exposed.
What to Design For
This is the rare moment when the fundamentals shift. Stop optimizing for individual efficiency. Start designing for coordination capacity.
- Build unproductive time together. Weekly dinners, not optional. Off-sites where the only goal is understanding each other’s working styles. You’re not paying for the dinner. You’re paying for the speed gain when you can move without re-explaining everything in the next crisis.
- Track the metric: decision latency under ambiguity. How fast can your team move when the path isn’t clear? That’s your coordination ROI.
- Make exit costly without trapping people. Multi-year incentives that vest over three to four years. Promote from within. Reward tenure. When exit costs something real, people work through coordination problems instead of exiting to cleaner situations.
Design for sustained coordination under pressure. Most teams optimize structure away. You want to design it in deliberately.
Create cross-functional dependencies you don’t let people self-sort out. Force coordination between product, engineering, design. Assign boring middle projects—work that requires grinding together through ambiguity. Coordination capacity is built through practice coordinating when things are hard.
The Wager
When AI makes everyone capable, what makes your team valuable?
Coordination capacity that compounds through sustained presence.
We’re at one of those rare inflection points where the logic of organization could shift. For decades, treating teams as disposable made economic sense. Individual capability was scarce. AI flipped that. Individual capability is abundant and cheap. Coordination capacity is the scarce asset that determines who wins.
If you’re still optimizing for keeping options open, you’re training for the old game. The new game rewards depth. Domain expertise is rentable. Relational capacity is earned through staying.
Here’s your weekly practice: the keep-repair-advance ritual. One relationship to repair. One obligation to keep, even when inconvenient. One domain to advance through depth, not breadth.
Your competitive advantage isn’t having smarter people or better AI tools. The advantage that compounds is having people who can coordinate without drag because they’ve built trust through staying. That advantage can’t be copied quickly.
So here’s the test: next time you’re tempted to cut headcount or hire fractional talent, ask whether you’re optimizing for individual capability or coordination capacity. The first is abundant and getting cheaper. The second is scarce and compounds with time.
Your cold plunge builds discipline. Staying through difficulty builds coordination capacity. AI can replicate the first. It can’t touch the second.
This is our chance to fix what we broke. But only if we see it for what it is: a fundamental shift in the logic of how work should be organized, not just a new tool for doing the same work faster.