Am I off base or out of touch or am I onto something that I can’t quite name? This is an active question that I’ve been engaging with and testing lately but am acutely feeling in this moment. Do teams actually struggle with cross discipline coordination and communication - or is this just the role of managers to solve? Does improved coordination and communication actually increase our well being, quality of work and felt experience at work?

I’ve been finding myself in conversations with dear friends who work in varied levels and disciplines in tech and what I’m finding in each one is “YES, you’d be great at this” and “I wonder what it would actually look like and who would need this”.

Naming “this” has been a difficult thing. Connective tissue, initiative partner are phrases that feel accurate and yet don’t convey much in practicality. It also feels like something that orgs “should” already have or that it would be hard to admit that it’s something that they could use help with.

And so, I am curious is anyone seeing this? Does your immediate work feel like it’s not connected to the whole? I am sure you see the KPIs and that you can logically see how your work bubbles into the KPI, it’s likely on a spreadsheet somewhere.

But do you feel that your work is connected to the whole? Do you feel connected to the whole?

What I’ve experienced first hand (twice) and seen time and again and are engineers who are burning out; It’s hard to feel digital work and easy to get to the end of a day feeling like nothing of value was done.

I was recently in a monastery for a few weeks in rural Thailand - about a third of the visiting practitioners were engineers burning out in tech. People from Europe, Asia and America, they were in a key discerning period, mostly towards the end of the line taking a sabbatical or a long vacation to discern what they needed to keep going. A common thread was feeling the insignificance of our work, or feeling like we are just cogs in a machine, feeling siloed and ultimately alone in our work.

It’s one thing to know in the mind the impact of our work but an entirely other thing to actually experience and feel like we are doing something worthwhile. Looking back on my career the top moments were when I really felt like I was doing something truly as a team. Not just individual tasks that we brainstormed, not just sprint meetings, not pizza parties - deep collaboration and mind share across all disciplines.

It’s this felt sense that I know is absolutely invaluable. It’s the felt sense that is in the driver seat - whether we like to admit that or not.

Anyway, that is what I am dealing with at the moment. I don’t know how to sell this, I don’t exactly know who to talk to, I don’t know what I don’t know.

But I’m open and I’d love to hear feedback.

Reach out, let’s chat.