Low diatribe

I once worked inside an organization of 600 engineers moving in perfect lockstep, like AT-ATs trudging across Hoth. Massive, methodical, unstoppable in their predetermined path. Each team knew exactly what they were supposed to build, when they were supposed to build it, and how it would integrate with the seventeen other teams building adjacent pieces. The coordination was impressive in its mechanical precision.

Then their authentication system started failing under load, and my team was one of those chosen to charge, er, trudge into the breach.

The official solution was exactly what you'd expect. Divide the problem among the appropriate teams, assign ownership of each component, and hope everything integrated cleanly at the end. My team was handed one piece of this incomplete puzzle. We were supposed to rebuild the session management layer with only a blackbox understanding of how it connected to the frontend validation or the backend token generation.

Our scrum master looked at this fragmented approach and suggested something that seemed wasteful through corporate eyes. Pull members from the other teams into a room and map the entire system together. I felt relieved. This was the first time in almost two years on that contract I'd seen the kind of confluence I knew was possible within a larger structure. I'd experienced it in smaller organizations, but something always seemed to get lost at corporate scale.

The resistance was immediate. These were senior engineers accustomed to working in isolation, protecting their domains, communicating through tickets and specifications. Why should they spend time explaining their pieces to people who weren't supposed to touch them?

But gradually, something unexpected happened. The room filled with sticky notes and conflicting diagrams. People interrupted each other, argued about definitions, expressed confusion about parts of the system they were supposed to own.

I found myself admitting to a false assumption about how the session tokens were being validated. The senior engineer confessed she didn't really understand how session management was handled by the frontend. The junior developer spotted a race condition the rest of us had missed. The product manager realized our user stories had gaps that created the performance bottlenecks. What emerged wasn't just a better technical solution. It was shared ownership of the complexity.

For two weeks, we operated differently. I volunteered to work on pieces I was curious about, not just comfortable with. When bugs appeared, engineers fixed issues outside their original scope because we all understood the system's logic. The authentication rebuild finished on time, not because anyone worked faster, but because the integration problems that usually consume the second half of complex projects simply didn't exist.

Then the experiment ended. The client looked at all the cross-team meetings, the messy whiteboard sessions, the time spent explaining context to people outside their assigned roles, and decided the overhead was too much. The client phased out scrum masters shortly after that, pushing the burden of coordination onto the product owners. The AT-ATs resumed their march.

The anomaly

What I experienced in that room was astronomically improbable under those conditions. These engineers had spent years learning to work in isolation, to own their pieces completely, to communicate through formal channels. The organizational immune system was designed to prevent exactly this kind of messy, uncertain collaboration.

The scrum master had given us permission to construct a temporary pocket where different rules applied. Saying "I don't understand this part" became helpful rather than a branding of incompetence. Solving the problem mattered more than appearing smart. The shift happened gradually, almost imperceptibly. I admitted I didn't understand a design decision, and instead of judgment, I got curiosity.

I'd always approached complex problems the way master lyricist Aesop Rock describes it. "All I ever wanted was to pick apart the day, put the pieces back together my way." That impulse to impose my own logic on chaos, to find patterns that made sense to me, had served me well working alone or in small teams.

But in that room, something shifted. "My way" became "Our way." The day got picked apart not by one mind imposing order, but by multiple perspectives revealing connections that no single viewpoint could see. We were still picking apart complexity and reassembling it, but now it was our way of making sense, not just mine.

Each time someone admitted uncertainty and received curiosity instead of judgment, our safe zone expanded a little more. With that growing trust, we found ourselves able to tackle more complex problems, to volunteer for pieces outside our comfort zones, to challenge assumptions we'd been carrying individually. The very act of coming together like this was building the trust that made deeper collaboration possible.

What collective intelligence feels like

Once we understood the problem collectively, the rebuild became collaborative rather than competitive. We volunteered for pieces we were curious about, not just comfortable with. We designed interfaces together instead of throwing requirements over walls.

Most organizations approach complex work like baseball. Fixed positions, segmented plays, clear handoffs between roles. But solving complex problems with trust felt more like soccer. The field stayed fluid. We moved where the problem needed us. Success depended on reading each other and adjusting together.

We developed a shared intuition about what worked and what didn't. We could sense when something felt wrong even if we couldn't immediately articulate why. Ideas built on each other in ways that surprised all of us. Solutions appeared that no single person could have conceived.

Why it couldn't last

The experiment worked at scale because it was temporary. A brief suspension of the normal rules, protected by a scrum master who understood that collective problem-solving requires different conditions than individual productivity. But the larger system remained unchanged.

When the authentication project ended, we returned to our assigned teams, our defined roles, our formal communication channels. The organization's immune system reasserted itself, treating our collaborative moment as inefficient overhead rather than a pattern to be replicated. The messy process that had eliminated integration problems was deemed too costly compared to the clean lines of individual ownership.

I've experienced this pattern repeatedly. Moments of collective intelligence emerge in the spaces between formal structures, in the gaps where trust can temporarily take root. But they remain fragile, dependent on specific conditions that most organizations aren't designed to sustain. Which means it's up to us to keep pushing, keep experimenting, keep creating these pockets wherever we can.

What I learned from those two weeks stays with me. Trust doesn't scale through policy or process. It emerges in specific moments, between specific people, when the conditions align. The scrum master had created a pocket where my vulnerability became useful, where uncertainty became a tool for exploration rather than a sign of incompetence.

I carry that with me and have focused on building teams that share this quality. We could disassemble complex systems together, examine the pieces without ego, and rebuild something better than any individual could have designed alone. We treated complexity as a puzzle to solve collectively rather than territory to defend individually.

These bubbles are possible, but rare and fleeting. Even my most successful experiment in this only lasted three years, ended prematurely by the corporate march for shareholder value. Most organizations stay structured like those AT-ATs. Powerful, coordinated, and fundamentally unable to adapt to a tow cable. I know collective intelligence is possible because I've been part of it and seen its impact. The question that follows me is how to create conditions where it becomes sustainable.

The challenge is to grow tow cables, together.