The Silent Agreement You're Operating Under

I keep noticing how often teams are operating on a set of assumptions that were never fully named. Early on, this can feel like a strength as you move fast and vibe with your new colleagues. There’s shared context, a lot of trust, and an unspoken sense of what needs to happen next. Pausing to spell everything out can feel unnecessary, or even counterproductive, so people keep moving without a clear organization design.

For a while, this works quite well. Over time, though, the team grows, the work stretches, and the original assumptions don’t quite travel with it. Expectations begin to drift, conversations take longer than they used to, and decisions start to feel heavier, even when the issues themselves aren’t especially complex. People leave team meetings with the sense that something has shifted, but can’t pinpoint exactly what.

It’s easy to read this as a communication problem, a performance issue, or just the expected friction that comes with scale. More often, what’s changed is the agreement underneath the work. I'm talking about the informal understanding of who owns what, how decisions get made, and what “good” looks like. When there isn’t a regular way to revisit that agreement as the work evolves, people start adapting quietly on their own, smoothing over gaps instead of reopening the conversation.

That effort can look like commitment or leadership at first glance. Eventually, though, this kind of adaptation stops being helpful and starts to create real organizational drag. Capable teams feel stretched in ways that are difficult to articulate as accountability gets harder to pin down.

What I’ve learned over the years is that most organizations don’t struggle because people stop caring. In my experience, the opposite is true. They struggle because they’re still operating under (often unspoken) terms that made sense earlier on, terms that no longer reflect the complexity of the work and or the volume of the workload.