The hidden culprit behind many stalled teams is the Information Bottleneck Law: every additional hand‑off in a workflow multiplies the chance of a critical distortion. The law works because each hand‑off adds a cognitive context switch, a formatting step, and a tacit assumption about meaning; any one of these can introduce error, and the probability compounds quickly. In 1999, NASA’s navigation team sent a trajectory file to the spacecraft operations group, but the file listed thrust in pound‑force while the receiving software expected newtons.

The mismatch went unnoticed through three layers of verification, and the orbiter entered the Martian atmosphere at the wrong angle, burning up. The mistake was not the engineers’ competence but the brittle chain of data translation that lacked a single source of truth. Teams that flatten these chains—by co‑locating owners, using shared schemas, and automating validation—see error rates collapse and velocity rise, because the same work no longer passes through opaque, manual filters.

The paradox is that adding “more documentation” often deepens the bottleneck, while a lean, automated contract between producers and consumers cuts distortion to near zero.