The Phantom Jam in Organizations
I recently learnt about something called Phantom Jams (this while being part of a traffic jam myself. I am from Bangalore, so thats nothing new for me.) The fascinating part is that a phantom jam has got nothing to do with a crash. They start with a tap on the brake and the car behind then brakes harder so on and so forth which causes a cascading effect triggering a chain reaction, eventually causing subsequent drivers to slow down and create a jam. This can and mostly happens even in relatively free-flowing traffic.
The Organizational Parallel
Just like traffic phantom jams, organizations experience similar cascading slowdowns as they grow. There’s no obvious blocker that you can point to. It is just a gradual, systemic slowdown that affects productivity and momentum. These organizational phantom jams are particularly insidious because they are invisible to those who are caught in them (this is how it is done here :-D), And, they significantly impact the organization’s ability to move faster and forward efficiently.
Introduction
Organizations are built on systems of people and tools. People within the organization in large orgs are mostly in distributed teams and that includes every function, Engineering to finance, talent acquisition to sales and the leadership. While everything needs to run and function smoothly, most often than not (having worked at large enterprises as well as startups) i’ve seen projects get delayed, approvals are slower, and the momentum just goes down. (Ofcourse there are some positives in being cautious and consicous, but, we are talking about inefficiences here) Most often than not i have seen the slowdown due to over engineered processes, lack of context during decision making or just pure dilution of information since it has exchanged so many hands before it reaches the decision maker.
This is the phantom jam of organizations.
In phantom jams within the org, make no mistake, people are working hard. They really are. But the output is disproportionately slow. These phantom jams don’t just remain operational glitches but become routine and the new normal.
For instance, It was normal for me (and frustrating as well) to get public cloud access after 2 weeks (after i had filled in a justification sheet for the need for access to it). This, while it was necessary for me to do my work that would earn revenue towards the company. You, just sort of accept that as the new normal.
Ofcourse i do not mean to diss the process here. A process is ofcourse put in place to avoid abuse but eventually you start questioning if processes are for humans or the other way around. And this an example of something that leads to a phantom jam. (it is the car a long way ahead of you tapping the brake which causes the ripple effect)
When things like these become part of the routine and eventually gets set into the culture (and it does get set into the new normal or the culture), people spend more time unblocking others than building things or moving forward.
Phantom jams in the org
The thing with these phantom jams is that they don’t really require major dysfunction. They occur in everyday interactions across all functions: Here are few that I mention to get the gears turning for you to observe these in everything that you do. (The reasons might be multiple for them, some of these are complex processes / problems )
Talent Acquisition
- Interviewers decline interviews without suggesting alternative times, creating a loop of rescheduling and delays.
- Recruiters are expected to source candidates without clarity on budget, timeline, or project need, causing repeated back-and-forth with hiring managers.
Engineering & Delivery
- Requests for help to unblock themselves lack context — engineers don’t specify what they’ve tried already or where they’re blocked.
- There’s no clear escalation path or visibility into who owns what domain, leading to orphaned or ghosted concerns/queries.
Sales & Presales
- Sales team members aren’t updated on the latest service offerings or changes in delivery capacity, leading to over or under promising.
- Presales engineers lack visibility into current bench strength, affecting accurate scoping and feasibility analysis.
- Coordination between sales and delivery breaks down due to missing internal documentation on what can be promised and what requires customization.
Marketing
- Content creation is delayed because brand guidelines aren’t easily accessible or up-to-date.
- Marketing teams lack real-time access to product updates, leading to outdated messaging.
Finance & Operations
- Employee reimbursements are delayed due to inconsistent submission formats.
- Vendor onboarding takes weeks due to fragmented approval chains.
- Travel bookings are delayed due to unclear policy interpretation.
These moments are not really explosive. They’re subtle and the slowness creeps in as you grow. The cost of this slowness however is real. The true cost of phantom jams becomes apparent when it starts taking effect across functions because every function is working towards a common goal for the organization which is to add more revenue.
So, a very crude example of the phantom jam is
- A hiring team which isn’t able to hire engineers faster because budgets arent approved by finance for the role and the role isn’t defined sufficiently faster by the engineering function. (The cost here is loss of talent from the market since they picked up other opportunities.)
Measuring for Phantom jams
It would be a healthy exercise to understand on what basis would you measure phantom jams or slowness.
A few metrics to track would be.
- Measure the time to complete cross-functional tasks.
- Measure the communication volume around standard processes.
- Measure the rework percentage on tasks.
- Measure the time spent in coordination.
Root causes
Typically phantom jams in organizations are due to and critically reviewing the following might help avoid phantom jams.
Systems built with an assumption of lack of trust. In the book, the Speed of Trust there is a beautiful metric that sums up the cost of it. As trust goes down, costs increase and speed decreases. The side effect of this tends to be overengineered processes.
Lack of context rich communication. Every message / request should include atleast the who, what, why, by when.
Poor Delegation Hygiene. Delegating responsibilities without really outlining the permission to play boundaries. Every responsibilty comes with certain rights and those rights aren’t clearly defined when the responsibility is delegated.
Misaligned incentives between teams. Think, prior to the DevOps practices introduction. The system admins are incentivized for maximum uptime whereas developers are incentivized for faster application releases. This misalignment created a constant tension where system admins would resist changes that could improve deployment speed, while developers would push for changes that might compromise stability. The introduction of DevOps practices, with shared responsibility for both stability and speed, aligned these incentives. Teams now work together to achieve both goals, resulting in faster deployments with better stability. This is why modern organizations can deploy hundreds of times per day while maintaining high reliability.
Conclusion
Phantom jams in organizations are like the childhood story of a frog in slowly boiling water - the temperature rises so gradually that we don’t notice until it’s too late. The key to preventing these jams is to making sure you identify them early and get out of it:
- Review Processes Iteratively: Regularly reviewing processes and workflows for signs of unnecessary friction and/or slowdown.
- Measure Process Effectiveness: Track metrics to identify slowdowns before they become the new normal.
- Build Trust: Design systems that assume trust rather than distrust.
- Communicate Clearly: Ensure every interaction includes necessary context.
- Align Incentives: Make sure teams are working toward shared goals rather than competing objectives.
The goal isn’t to eliminate all processes (which will create chaos). It’s to build systems / processes that move at the speed of trust, where people can focus on creating value rather than navigating bureaucracy.