Teams Drift Apart by Default
A 5-minute reset for tech leaders who want one team, real inclusion, and shipping without silent fragmentation.
Most teams don’t break because of conflict. They break because of drift. People get busy, deadlines tighten, trust becomes uneven, and without anyone explicitly deciding it, the team turns into a set of parallel lanes. Sub-teams form, side channels become “the real place,” decisions happen where not everyone is present, and a few people become the center while others slowly become the edge. Then leaders notice the symptoms and reach for the usual medicine:
“We need more alignment.” – No, you need maintenance.
Stoicism gives you the correct mental model: everything decays unless you apply energy. Your body, your attention, your character, your relationships. Teams are the same. Culture has entropy. Cohesion is not a permanent state you achieve once; it is a weekly practice you keep alive. So here is the Monday move: assume drift, then design one small constraint that pulls everyone back into a shared identity.
“One team” is not a value; it’s an operating system
Many leaders try to solve fragmentation with statements.
“We’re one team.”
“We communicate openly.”
“We are inclusive.”
But values do not beat incentives, and slogans do not beat reality. The system wins. If the system makes it easiest to talk in the fastest language, people will. If the system rewards speed through side channels, side channels will grow. If the system allows decisions to happen where only a subset is present, the subset becomes the team. Culture is not what you believe; culture is what your environment makes effortless. The uncomfortable truth is simple: if someone can do their work without the rest of the team, they eventually will, and then you no longer have a team.
ℹ️ Principle: The Law of Least Effort (plus the Default Effect).
Under time pressure, people don’t choose what they endorse; they decide what costs the least effort. The environment becomes a silent decision-maker: what is fastest, most convenient, and socially rewarded turns into the default. That’s why incentives beat values, and why systems beat slogans. If the lowest-effort path is decided in a side channel, decisions will migrate there. If the lowest-effort path is speaking the majority language, that becomes the norm. If the lowest-effort path is “ship and hand off,” then “done” will quietly mean handoff. Over time, the team doesn’t just repeat the behavior; they internalize it as “how we work.”
Inclusion is not “being nice,” it is controlling the default
In many organizations, inclusion is treated like an attitude problem, as if people simply need to be more considerate. But most exclusion is not malice. It’s momentum. Under pressure, humans choose what is easy. They choose the path that costs the least energy. That is why drift happens. It isn’t personal, it’s physics.
Examples: Multilingual teams, and you are creating same-language subteams, even though you never wanted to have those. Because it’s easier to communicate in your mothers tongue.
Imagine a team with five Germans, two Portuguese, one Polish, and one English person, and you’ve “committed” to English. Even then, if you tell the team to self-organize and form sub-teams for the day, you can predict the outcome before it happens. The low-friction path creates language clusters, and language clusters create isolation, even if everyone had good intentions.
The leader’s job is to change the default, not with speeches but with constraints. The Stoic question is, what is actually in my control here? You cannot control whether people like each other. You cannot control whether everyone stays motivated. But you can control the system that decides who is “in the room” when the real work happens, and you can control whether decisions are made in places the whole team can see. That is leadership.
You can influence how you act, and you can influence the environment in which everybody is dwelling daily – nothing more, nothing less.
So what would you influence to change isolation here? Do you have an answer to that?
The clarity test for “Are we one team?”
Here is a simple measure of cohesion: can any person on the team answer three questions without hesitation?
What are we building right now?
How do decisions get made?
Where do I go when I’m blocked?
If those answers depend on who you ask, you don’t have one team; you have multiple maps with multiple capitals. And the people on the edge always feel it first, while the leader often feels it last, because leaders tend to live in the center by default. The test is not “Do we feel good?” The test is: can the person with the least context still operate with confidence?
Your move for this week
Make collaboration visible by default. Make the team language shared by default. Choose one and enforce it gently but consistently.
Pick one recurring moment where drift shows up, then install one “anti-drift” constraint. Not ten changes. One. You are not trying to micromanage the team; you are trying to make cohesion the path of least resistance. The constraints that work are boring, consistent, and easy to follow. Make decision-making public by default. Make collaboration visible by default. Make the team language shared by default. Choose one and enforce it gently but consistently.
If you want a sentence you can use in your first meeting this week, use this: starting now, decisions that affect the team happen in a place the whole team can see. If it isn’t visible, it isn’t decided. That sentence removes a surprising amount of quiet exclusion, not because people are bad, but because you changed what “normal” looks like.
What to write in your mirror-book today
If you do one reflective exercise today, make it this: where is the “real team” currently happening, and who is not in it? Which channel, meeting, or habit decides things without being accountable to the whole team? What did I tolerate because it was efficient, even though it made the team smaller? Be honest. This is not for guilt. This is for design. A Stoic leader does not blame the weather; they adjust the sails.
🍀 Learn how to journal in a stoic leadership way:
A 10-minute experiment that changes everything
This week, run a ten-minute “One Team Reset.” In your next team meeting, ask for a 60-second answer from each person: what you're working on, what you need, and what decision is blocked. Then do the one thing that matters: write down the blockers and choose a single owner for removing each one. Not “we’ll see.” Not “let’s sync.” One owner.
Teams don’t drift apart because they don’t care. They drift apart because the system allows problems to live in private until they harden into separation. Make problems visible early, and cohesion returns.
Close
A team is not a family by default. It is a system, and systems decay unless you maintain them. So this Monday, assume drift, then add one small piece of structure that makes “one team” the easiest option. If you want, reply with the one place your team currently drifts, and I’ll suggest a single constraint that fits your situation without adding meetings.
—Adrian
Old-But-Gold 😀 The Broken Windows effect is basically the same idea in a different perspective.
Broken Window Effect In Software Development
"The first broken window is the signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing."
Fix your problems early and adequately
This coming week, I want to start by focusing on what we are currently working on as a company, the SaaS product behind it, and what we have learned. One of the significant learnings was the Broken Window Effect.