Most coordination failures get blamed on tools, process, or “communication.” A lot of the time the real failure is structural: the system is asking too much of too few people, and it has no redundancy when those people are overloaded or unavailable.

This episode treats span of control and cross training as load bearing constraints, not management preferences.

Span of control is the ceiling on how many direct relationships, decisions, and escalations a person can carry before quality collapses. Once you exceed it, you get predictable symptoms: dropped handoffs, delayed approvals, brittle supervision, missed signals, and a culture of waiting.

Cross training is what prevents the single point of failure. It turns critical knowledge from a person into a capability, so the mission keeps moving when the center is busy, the expert is gone, or the situation degrades.

You will hear why trying to “work harder” does not fix this. If the load bearing constraints are violated, the structure fails no matter how talented people are. The fix is architectural: reduce coupling, distribute decisions, harden interfaces, and build redundancy through cross training.

Reflection: Are you treating overload as a personal performance issue, or as a structural constraint violation?

https://anthonyveltri.com/guide/doctrine-10-companion-span-of-control-and-cross-training-are-load-bearing-constraints/