Heat engines achieve more power only when they can move energy across a temperature gradient without bottlenecked flow. The same mathematics describes how information moves through an organization: each person is a conduit, and the gradient is the urgency of a decision. When a team grows faster than its communication channels, the “thermal resistance” of meetings, emails, and approvals rises sharply, throttling the whole system. The result is not a linear slowdown but an exponential drag that can stall even the most capable groups.

During the 1970 Apollo 13 crisis, flight directors faced a cascade of alarms, oxygen leaks, and power failures. Rather than flooding Mission Control with more engineers, they erected a single “white‑board” where every subsystem lead posted a concise status and a single “go/no‑go” decision point. This intentional bottleneck reduced thermal resistance, letting the crew’s limited power be allocated where it mattered most and ultimately saved lives.

Modern tech firms often ignore this law, hiring aggressively and layering meetings. The added “heat” of new hires and extra syncs raises friction, so the organization’s throughput collapses under its own weight. The paradox is that more capacity can produce less output unless the information pathway is deliberately narrowed.

The cure is to treat coordination as a heat‑exchange system: keep the gradient steep by limiting handoffs and centralizing decision points, rather than assuming raw headcount will automatically boost velocity.