Motion Without Translation: Why Fast Teams Slowly Lose the Plot

Fast-moving teams often prioritize execution speed over shared understanding, creating "motion without translation." While they ship quickly and metrics look good, the reasoning behind decisions gets lost as teams scale. This leads to accumulated "context debt," where new hires lack foundational knowledge, decisions become misaligned and past debates resurface. The issue is subtle, with no immediate failures, but eventually causes strategy drift, slowed execution and chaotic responses to problems. The fix isn’t more meetings or documentation but deliberately engineering "translation." Making decision rationales durable and treating them as essential artifacts. Without this, velocity becomes noise and progress loses meaning.