Project management tools track execution. Growth Wise tracks the coordination that makes execution possible — the agreements that project trackers inherit invisibly.
Direct Answer
Project management tools track execution: whether tasks were completed, whether deadlines were met, whether projects are on track. They answer "did the work get done?" Growth Wise tracks coordination: whether the agreement that spawned the work was real, whether the decision behind the task was genuinely closed, whether the alignment that got work started will hold long enough for the work to finish. A ticket can be marked complete while the decision that spawned it was based on fake alignment. The project tracker sees the completed ticket. Growth Wise sees the fake alignment that will surface as a problem later.
Project management is about execution. The layer it misses is the coordination that makes execution possible — the agreements, the scope decisions, the accountability structures. Those exist before the ticket is created. A project tracker can only see what happens after the coordination occurred. If the coordination was bad, the tracker inherits the problem invisibly.
Teams sometimes reach apparent agreement through conflict avoidance rather than genuine convergence. Everyone nodded. Nobody objected. The meeting ended with what looked like alignment. The project tracker gets a task creation. What it doesn't get is the flag that three people privately disagreed, one person interpreted scope completely differently, and the key dependency owner never explicitly committed. These are structural absences. They will surface downstream.
Coordination debt is structural. If an organization's coordination quality is low, it will keep experiencing the same pattern of problems: scope creep, late-surfacing conflicts, decisions that need to be relitigated, teams that build in incompatible directions. Project management tools produce post-mortems. They cannot detect the structural root cause — that the coordination layer is not producing durable agreements. Decision Reliability Infrastructure instruments that layer.
"A project tracker sees the completed ticket. Growth Wise sees the fake alignment that will surface as a problem later."
The system that instruments the coordination layer project tools can't see.
Content vs. structure: what was said vs. whether decisions closed.
The pattern where decisions thought to be closed keep reopening.
The coordination problems that remain invisible to project trackers.
INSIGHTSWhy coordination failures multiply when projects span multiple teams.
GUIDEThe coordination layer that project tools can't reach.
New articles on coordination dynamics, decision reliability, and the science of how teams actually work.
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