Something is deteriorating inside organizations that are executing well by every measurable efficiency metric. Task throughput is up. Meeting time is down. Workflow automation has reduced the administrative overhead of coordination. The dashboards look healthy. And then a strategy that should have worked — a cross-functional initiative that had executive sponsorship, adequate resourcing, and a coherent plan — fails quietly in the gap between functions, in the space where the lateral trust required to resolve unexpected obstacles used to live and no longer does.
Gartner's "Future of Work Trends 2026" report, published in January 2026, gave a name to one dimension of this problem: AI workslop — the low-quality, high-volume digital output produced when organizations pressure employees to extract AI productivity gains that have not yet materialized. Gartner researcher Emily Rose McRae documented how this pressure creates performance demands that consume precisely the cognitive bandwidth that careful, relational, high-context work requires.
The AI-driven efficiency imperative has created a dynamic in which the time available for thoughtful lateral coordination is crowded out by the obligation to produce and process algorithmic output. Tasks get done faster. The work that holds the organization together across functional boundaries — the informal conversations, the bilateral problem-solving, the relationship maintenance that makes cross-unit commitments possible — gets squeezed out by the pressure to maximize measurable throughput.
What the Allen Curve tells organizations that ignore it
Thomas Allen's research at MIT in the 1970s established a finding that has been replicated so many times across so many organizational contexts that it deserves to be treated as a law rather than a finding. Communication frequency between colleagues drops exponentially as the physical distance between them increases.
The drop is steep even at very small distances — colleagues seated metres apart in the same building collaborate measurably less than colleagues seated adjacent to each other. And the quality of collaboration drops further than the frequency, because the informal, high-bandwidth contact that resolves ambiguity, builds shared context, and creates the lateral trust on which cross-unit coordination depends is the type most sensitive to distance.
The distributed and remote-first organizational models that have become standard since 2020 have, in effect, moved every colleague to the furthest point on the Allen Curve. Asynchronous digital communication — email, Slack, project management systems — substitutes adequately for the information transfer component of collaboration and very poorly for everything else. The relational tissue that allows a manager in commercial to call a counterpart in medical affairs and work through an access barrier informally, before it becomes a formal escalation, is built through the kind of repeated casual contact that distributed work makes structurally difficult to sustain.
Where strategy execution actually lives
The formal machinery of strategy execution — the cascaded goals, the KPI dashboards, the quarterly reviews, the project management infrastructure — operates at the surface of organizations. It makes the vertical accountability structure visible. It does not make the horizontal coordination on which complex strategies depend visible, because horizontal coordination is built and maintained through relationships that are not formal, not tracked, and not legible in any reporting system.
When an initiative runs into an obstacle that requires two functions to negotiate a shared solution — when market access needs medical affairs to accelerate a dossier, when IT needs legal to make a judgment call on a data governance question, when supply chain needs commercial to revise a launch timeline — the speed and quality of that resolution depends entirely on whether the relevant people have a relationship that allows them to work through it informally.
If they do, the obstacle is resolved in a phone call. If they do not, it becomes a formal escalation that travels up two separate hierarchies before coming back down again, losing weeks and creating the political residue that makes the next cross-unit negotiation harder.
Organizations that have optimized away the conditions for informal relationship-building — through distributed work, relentless calendar efficiency, the elimination of unstructured time, and the replacement of face-to-face contact with asynchronous digital channels — have not only reduced informal communication. They have reduced the informal network capacity on which execution depends. The strategies that require cross-unit coordination to succeed will move at the speed of their weakest lateral relationship. In organizations where the informal network has been hollowed out, that speed is slow.
The investment that efficiency accounting misses
The problem with the efficiency model is that it accounts for what it can measure and misses what it cannot. The time spent in unstructured conversation between colleagues — the hallway exchange, the lunch that meanders into a problem-solving session, the fifteen minutes after a meeting that produces the bilateral agreement that makes the next three weeks of execution smoother — does not appear in any productivity metric.
It appears, invisibly, in the speed and reliability of cross-unit coordination. When it disappears, the disappearance does not show up on the dashboard. It shows up in execution failures that are attributed to wrong causes: individual leadership gaps, strategic misalignment, inadequate resourcing. The actual cause is the dissolution of the informal network that was sustaining coordination across the gap that formal systems cannot cross.
The organizations navigating this most deliberately are treating relationship investment as a strategic priority rather than a social amenity. They are creating structured occasions for the cross-unit contact that distributed work suppresses — convening the people who must coordinate, designing the conditions under which informal relationships can form around the actual work, and recognizing that the investment in human connection is not a concession to sentiment but a prerequisite for the execution capacity that the efficiency model assumes exists.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does optimizing for individual efficiency damage organizational strategy execution?
Strategy execution is fundamentally a social outcome — it depends on lateral trust, the informal commitment that a colleague in a different function will share the cost of a difficult transition, flag a problem before it becomes a crisis, and honour a commitment that was never written into a contract. These capacities are built through human contact that efficiency optimization systematically eliminates. Organizations that become rich in task throughput and poor in human density discover that their strategies move as fast as their relationships — which is to say, slowly and unreliably.
What is the Allen Curve and what does it reveal about organizational design?
Thomas Allen's research at MIT established that communication frequency between colleagues drops exponentially as physical distance between them increases — and that even modest distances within the same building produce significant reductions in collaboration quality. Its implication for distributed and remote-first organizations is direct: the informal communication that builds the lateral trust required for cross-unit coordination cannot be reliably substituted with asynchronous digital channels.
How can organizations protect execution capacity while pursuing efficiency?
The organizations managing this most effectively are treating relationship-building as a strategic investment rather than a social amenity. They are deliberately creating the conditions for informal cross-unit contact — structured convening, facilitated sessions that force the cross-boundary conversations that distributed work suppresses, and explicit recognition that the informal network is a strategic asset whose maintenance requires intentional design.