Why do teams struggle to coordinate even when everyone is competent? Often, the problem is not individual skill but that team members are working from different assumptions about the situation, priorities, roles, or what happens next. Research on shared mental models shows that teams coordinate better when they have enough overlapping understanding to anticipate one another and adapt as conditions change.
This can feel counterintuitive. Put capable people together, give them a clear goal, and teamwork should follow. Yet most of us have seen the opposite: a group full of experienced people duplicates work, misses a handoff, reacts to different priorities, or discovers late that two people understood the same plan differently.
Nobody necessarily made an obvious mistake. Each person may have acted reasonably based on the picture they had. The problem is that those pictures were no longer sufficiently aligned.
Coordination depends on more than communication
When teamwork goes wrong, the standard diagnosis is often “poor communication.” Sometimes that is correct, but it can be too vague to be useful. Teams can communicate frequently and still coordinate badly.
Imagine a project meeting where everyone hears the same update. One person interprets the deadline as fixed. Another assumes scope can change. A third believes a dependency has already been resolved. Everyone leaves the meeting feeling informed. The mismatch only becomes visible when their actions begin to collide.
The issue is not simply how much information moved. It is whether the team developed enough shared understanding of what that information meant for the work.
Team researchers use the term shared mental models for overlapping knowledge structures about the task, team, roles, equipment, or environment. They do not require everyone to think identically. In fact, teams need different expertise and perspectives. What matters is enough common ground to coordinate those differences.
Why shared understanding drifts
Shared understanding is not something a team establishes once and then owns permanently. Work changes. People notice different things. New information reaches one function before another. A customer changes a requirement. A delay that looks minor to one department changes the options available to another.
Each person updates their mental picture at a slightly different time. Small differences begin to appear. During routine work, the team can often absorb them. Under pressure, those gaps matter more because there is less time to stop and reconstruct the picture.
This helps explain why coordination can deteriorate precisely when experienced teams need it most. Familiarity can make people efficient because they do not need to explain every step. But it can also encourage an assumption that everybody still sees the situation the same way.
Research reviews have linked shared team mental models with coordination and performance, particularly in interdependent work. Studies also suggest that shared cognition can support adaptation when conditions are novel or changing. The mechanism is not mysterious: when people understand the task and one another’s roles, they can better anticipate what information matters and where it needs to go.
A team does not need everyone to know everything
There is another part of coordination that is easy to overlook. Teams need some understanding of where knowledge sits.
Daniel Wegner’s work on transactive memory described how groups can develop a distributed memory system: people do not all store the same knowledge, but they learn who knows what. In organizations, this matters because expertise is usually scattered across functions and levels.
A good team therefore does not need every member to become an expert in finance, operations, technology, customer behavior, and regulation. It needs a usable map of expertise. Who is closest to this problem? Who is likely to notice this type of change first? Whose input becomes important if a particular assumption stops holding?
Without that map, teams can have all the necessary expertise and still fail to use it. People ask the wrong person, repeat work that already exists, or make a decision without realizing that someone elsewhere holds the missing piece.
Why adding more meetings may not solve coordination
When managers see misalignment, adding meetings is an understandable response. More contact can help, but meeting frequency is not the same as shared understanding.
A team can spend hours exchanging status updates without surfacing the assumptions underneath them. In fact, additional information can make coordination harder if people are already overloaded and nobody distinguishes what has changed from what remains the same.
The more useful question is what the team needs to keep synchronized. In some work, that may be the current objective and constraints. In other work, it may be ownership, dependencies, expected risks, or the conditions that would cause the plan to change.
The answer will vary by team. What matters is that coordination is treated as an operating requirement rather than a personality trait.
Managers shape the conditions for coordination
Managers often try to improve teamwork by asking people to collaborate more. That can miss the structural problem. If roles are ambiguous, information is fragmented, or people cannot challenge an outdated assumption, goodwill will not keep the team aligned for long.
Leaders can instead pay attention to whether the team has a common picture before important action. Do people understand the same objective? Are dependencies visible? Does the group know where relevant expertise sits? Can someone say that their picture of the situation has changed without being treated as difficult?
This becomes especially important when information is distributed. The most senior person is unlikely to hold every relevant detail. Coordination improves when the team can bring partial observations together rather than expecting one person to see the whole system.
Good teamwork is an information problem as well as a people problem
Competence remains important. So do trust, communication, and leadership. But none of them guarantees coordination if people are acting from incompatible pictures of reality.
That is why a team can look healthy and still drift out of alignment. Everyone may be busy, cooperative, and individually correct while the collective response becomes less coherent.
The practical implication is simple: do not judge teamwork only by whether people get along or communicate frequently. Look at whether their understanding stays connected as the situation changes.
Teams do not become effective because everybody thinks the same way. They become more effective when different people can contribute different information while maintaining enough shared understanding to act together.