10 Visual Metaphors — When shared meaning erodes faster than you can ship
"Critical knowledge disappears faster than your team can preserve it. Decisions get abstracted. Assumptions go undocumented. Ownership blurs across tools, teams, and time."
Your velocity metrics say everything is fine. These patterns say otherwise.
And AI is accelerating the problem. As code gets written faster, the gap between what's built and what's understood grows wider — humans and AI systems operating on fragmented, incompatible histories.
Sprint velocity is up. Cycle time looks healthy. But nothing meaningful ships.
Documentation exists. Onboarding is "complete." Yet knowledge walks out faster than it transfers.
The retro said aligned. The standups sound aligned. The outputs diverge anyway.
Context Collapse hides in three places your dashboards can't see:
Critical context lives in one person's head. When they leave, it leaves with them.
Code that ships but nobody owns. Requirements that exist but nobody remembers why.
The same problems surface repeatedly across teams — but never get connected.