The Coordination Tax Podcast
Why execution breaks when shared reality lags behind.
Conversations with operators, founders, and leaders who've lived the reality of keeping organizations aligned. Not consultants who theorize about it — people who've watched coordination break, rebuilt systems, and felt the pain of teams working on conflicting priorities.
Hosted by Kristian Luoma, Co-Founder & Head of Product at In Parallel. From Helsinki, Finland.
You Can't Sword-Fight a Bullet: Alberto Torres on surviving disruption
Alberto Torres — former Nokia executive, ex-McKinsey partner, and author of The Z Curve — on what actually happened at Nokia, why great peace-time leaders quietly fail in war-time, and what every company facing AI right now should learn from the companies that got disruption right.
Your Leadership Doesn't Know What's Going On: Olivia Montgomery on why decisions belong lower in the org
Olivia Montgomery — principal analyst at Data Frame and former Gartner researcher — on why every layer up the org chart knows less about what's really going on, and why the fix isn't more visibility for leadership but pushing decisions down two or three levels.
You Don't Get to Be the Rock Star Anymore: Craig Denison on the founder's hardest transition
Craig Denison — head of growth at The Table Group (Patrick Lencioni's firm) and founder of Green Thumb Consulting — on the transition every founder hits when execution stops running through their brain, and why 99% of the time the founder is creating the dysfunction they are trying to fix.
You Don't Have a Training Problem: Dr. Christie Vanorsdale on the L&D order-taker trap
Dr. Christie Vanorsdale — founder of Vanorsdale Learning Lab, cognitive multimedia learning researcher, and fractional Chief Learning Officer — on why L&D keeps solving the wrong problems, and what changes when you stop treating it as an order taker.
AI Is Quietly Eating Your Week: Kristian Luoma on the Coordination Tax Index 2026
A solo episode on the first quantitative measure of coordination overhead. 247 managers, five countries, 16.5 hours a week — and why the heaviest AI users are carrying the most load, not the least.
What Really Happened to the Spotify Model: Hosanna Ouellette and Nora Bereczkei on autonomy, agents, and the 26 rocket ships
Hosanna Ouellette and Nora Bereczkei ran the operating model rebuild inside Spotify. They explain why autonomy stopped scaling, how they stopped shipping the org chart to users, and why agents break the purposeful ambiguity every operating model quietly relies on.