The Collaboration Leak | Article 0: The Logic of the Leak

I see it everywhere: I hire brilliant people, then I watch their speed vanish because I’ve connected them using High-Latency Human Protocols.

It is like buying ten high-end servers and hooking them up with a dial-up modem. The individual CPUs are fast, but the System Throughput is limited by the “Network Jitter” of the humans. I don’t lose the deadline because the code is hard; I lose it because the Handshake between two engineers took three days to complete.

The Human Interconnect
In any system, the most expensive operation is a network call. In a team, that call is “Alignment.” Before two people can build together, they have to sync their mental maps. It’s a messy, high-cost process:

• Context Serialization: To share an idea, an engineer has to turn a complex, 3D mental model into clumsy, linear speech or text.
• The De-Serialization Error: If the listener hears it wrong, a Logic Bug is born. We don’t lose time to slow typing; we lose it to “re-explaining” because the first handshake failed.
• Packet Loss (The Ego Filter): When a senior dev ignores a junior’s warning, or someone hides info in a private DM, that’s Systemic Packet Loss. The data to fix the bug was there, but the network protocol dropped it.

Why the “System” is Slow
I see managers obsess over “Individual Commits,” but they ignore Network Congestion. If a “Rockstar” dev won’t document their work, they become a Network Partition. They are fast on their own, but they make everyone else crawl because no one can “route” through them to get an answer.

The team isn’t being lazy. They are Synchronizing. They are spending 60% of their energy just trying to figure out what the other 40% are doing.

The Blueprint: 7 Patches for the Internal Network
I’ve realized my job isn’t to “manage.” I am a Network Architect. My goal is to move the team from a congested hub to a high-bandwidth mesh.

In this series, I’m going to walk through the 7 patches I use to fix human latency:

1. The Tribal Knowledge Silo – Moving data from “Local Cache” (brains) to “Shared Memory” (docs).
2. The Ego Protocol – Fixing the “Signal Collision” when being right matters more than being functional.
3. The Review Deadlock – Speeding up the “ACK/NACK” cycle so code doesn’t sit and rot.
4. The Glue Work Gap – Rewarding the “Load Balancers”—the people who keep everyone else in sync.
5. The Handover Friction – Stopping the “Packet Loss” that happens when a project changes hands.
6. The Implicit Bias Filter – Fixing the “Logic Error” where we ignore good data because of who sent it.
7. The Trust Handshake – Cutting the “Verification Overhead” (micromanagement) so people can just move.

Submit a Bug Report
To debug your network, you have to measure the Wait Time.

Look at your projects: How much time is spent “Processing” (coding), and how much is spent “Waiting for I/O” (waiting for a reply, a review, or a decision)?

If the wait is longer than the work, your network is congested. You don’t need faster CPUs; you need a Higher Bandwidth Protocol.