Farah is staring at the screen again, her eyes tracing the pixelated edges of a Jira ticket that has aged 22 days in the span of a single afternoon. The status hasn’t changed. It is still ‘Awaiting Cross-Functional Sign-off,’ a phrase that has become the white noise of her professional life. There are 82 comments on this ticket, most of them consisting of people tagging other people to ask if they have seen the previous tag. It is a digital recursive loop, a ghost in the machine of modern productivity. My head still rings from the seventh sneeze I just endured-a violent, rhythmic interruption that feels strangely similar to the way a good idea gets jolted out of existence by a committee.

We are taught that collaboration is the ultimate virtue. We are told that ‘none of us is as smart as all of us,’ which is a beautiful sentiment until you realize that ‘all of us’ is currently stuck in a Zoom room debating the hex code of a button for 42 minutes while the actual product remains broken.

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Ava T.J., an insurance fraud investigator I know, tells me that the best way to hide a crime is to involve 12 different people in the paperwork. If everyone is responsible, she says, then effectively no one is.

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I see the same thing happening in software, in marketing, in every corner of the corporate world that has replaced individual agency with the safety of the herd. Farah’s ticket is a simple UI fix. It requires changing a single line of code. But because that line of code touches the ‘User Experience Layer,’ it needs the blessing of the UX team. Because it’s in the checkout flow, Legal needs to ensure we aren’t accidentally promising a free pony to users in Nebraska. Because it’s a change, the DevOps team needs to schedule a 22-minute sync to discuss the ‘blast radius.’

We have reached a point where the cost of coordination is higher than the value of the work itself. We call it ‘alignment,’ but it’s actually a sophisticated form of cowardice. By requiring four different teams to bless a single step, the organization ensures that if something goes wrong, the blame is so thin it can’t be pinned on a single chest. It’s a protection racket. We trade speed for the illusion of safety, and in doing so, we create a culture where the most successful people are not the ones who build, but the ones who successfully navigate the waiting.

Ava T.J. once told me about a case where $922 was stolen every week for a year through a series of ‘verified’ transactions. Each transaction was signed off by 2 managers. When she interviewed them, both managers said the same thing: ‘I assumed the other person had checked the details.’ In reality, the more names there are on a document, the less likely any of them have actually read it with a critical eye.

I’m currently looking at my own desk, where a stack of 12 folders is waiting for my ‘input.’ I know exactly what will happen. I will look at the top one, see that Mike and Sarah have already initialed it, and I will add my own squiggle without a second thought. I am part of the problem. I am the clog. I hate this about myself, but the system is designed to reward this specific type of negligence. If I ask a difficult question, I delay the project by another 12 days. If I just sign, we move to the next stage of waiting.

In environments where the stakes are high but the process is clean, like the systems found at dewapoker, there is a respect for the speed of the game. In those structured spaces, you realize that friction is the enemy of any meaningful engagement. You can’t have a fluid experience if you have to stop every 2 seconds to ask for a consensus. True flow requires a set of rules that allow for individual movement within a shared framework, rather than a system where every movement requires a vote.

Why do we fear the individual contributor so much? Why have we built these 62-layer deep hierarchies of approval? I suspect it’s because we’ve forgotten how to trust. Trust is expensive. It requires knowing that Farah might make a mistake and being okay with that. It requires acknowledging that a 12-minute error that is fixed in 2 minutes is better than a 22-day delay for a ‘perfect’ solution.

Ava T.J. would call that ‘institutionalized fraud.’ Not the kind involving money, but the kind involving time. We are stealing time from ourselves and calling it ‘due diligence.’ I wonder how much of our global GDP is just people waiting for someone else to reply to an email they only sent to avoid making a decision. I bet it’s at least 12 percent. Maybe 32.

The irony is that real collaboration-the kind that actually produces something-usually happens in the margins. It’s the 22-second conversation in the hallway. It’s the ‘hey, I’m just going to push this fix, let me know if it breaks’ Slack message. But you can’t put ‘hallway conversation’ on a performance review, so we continue to build these elaborate, heavy structures of formal coordination.

Farah finally gets a notification. It’s a question from a manager in the Sydney office who wants to know if the change will affect the 2012 legacy database. Farah knows it won’t. She’s already tested it. But she can’t just say that. She has to write a report. She has to schedule a call. The cycle begins anew.

We are haunted by the ghosts of past errors, and we build our present-day processes to exorcise them. But you can’t run a company based on the fear of what happened in 2002. You have to run it based on the reality of today.

Clarity Over Safety

What would your work look like if you stopped waiting for the blessing? It’s a terrifying question because it removes the safety net of the group. If you fail, it’s on you. But if you succeed, that’s on you too. And in a world of 82-comment Jira tickets, that kind of clarity is the rarest thing of all.