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Something’s Afoot.

We can all feel it. Something is changing in how work gets done. Now that AI has made execution fast, the slow part is us. We spend more time than ever re-aligning, clarifying misunderstandings, chasing context and waiting for everyone to agree.

We started this newsletter and began building Afoot because we saw this coming. And because we believe the same technology accelerating our confusion can also fix it.

Coordination breaks down the same way in every team. And spotting patterns that repeat is exactly what AI is good at.

The best teams don’t stay aligned through discipline; they set things up so staying aligned is the easy thing to do.

We come from inside the problem.

We come from the leadership side: over fifteen years leading teams through uncertainty, and experiencing firsthand what happens to great leaders pushed into middle management. Their days fill with low-value coordination work until the judgment that made them exceptional is no longer where their time goes.

We also come from the engineering side, designing the operational backbone of startups and the interfaces between teams the way developers design APIs between systems: simple, barebones and built to reduce ambiguity. When coordination is engineered well, small teams can move with extraordinary speed. It’s just very hard to build, because most organizations treat coordination as a soft skill instead of something that can be intentionally designed.

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