The Empowerment Paradox: Why Intent Isn’t Enough

In Brief

• The empowerment gap is structural, not cultural. Leadership intent doesn’t survive organizational architecture that creates dependencies.
• Traditional fixes fail because they address symptoms (autonomy, alignment, culture) rather than the root cause: how work is architected.
• Three infrastructure elements enable real autonomy: clarity before coordination, trust through structure, and independence through boundaries.
• Implication: New projects can be architected for empowerment from the start, even if legacy organizations can’t retrofit it.

The Empowerment Gap

Your company says teams are empowered. Your teams say they’re not.

Both are probably telling the truth.

I keep seeing this pattern: leadership genuinely believes they’ve created empowered teams. They’ve read the books. They’ve restructured. They’ve changed the language.

But talk to the teams, and you hear a different story. “We’re empowered to make decisions… as long as they align with what leadership already decided.” “We own the roadmap… but product priorities come from above.”

Here’s what I’m starting to think: the problem isn’t intent. It’s infrastructure.

The Research: Empowerment Is Structural

Laura Klein’s recent analysis for Nielsen Norman Group, “Why Most Product Teams Aren’t Really Empowered,” digs into why this gap exists. Her framing crystallized something I’ve been thinking about.

It’s not usually bad leadership. It’s structural.

Klein identifies specific conditions where empowerment actually works:

• Smaller teams with clear boundaries
• Journey-centric structures (not component-centric)
• Minimized dependencies between teams

The problem? Most large organizations have the opposite. Shared systems. Interdependent teams. Component-based ownership where everyone touches everything.

Klein cites an example that stopped me cold: a simple navigation change required approval from 14 different teams.

Fourteen teams. For a nav change.

That’s not a leadership problem. That’s a structural one.

Key insight: When a navigation change requires 14 teams, the problem isn’t leadership. It’s architecture.

Why Autonomy, Alignment, and Culture Fail

Here’s the uncomfortable pattern I’m noticing.

When organizations realize empowerment isn’t working, they usually reach for one of three fixes:

1. More autonomy – “Just let teams decide!” But dependencies don’t disappear by declaring autonomy.
2. Better alignment – “More planning sessions!” But coordination costs scale with the square of team count.
3. Cultural change – “We need trust!” But trust doesn’t survive when shared systems create constant conflicts.

None of these address the structural issue Klein identified: the architecture of the work itself creates dependencies that make autonomy impossible.

Your database team can’t make truly autonomous decisions when three other teams depend on the same schema. Your platform team can’t move independently when every change affects everyone else.

At a certain scale, coordination requirements overwhelm empowerment intent.

The core tension: At scale, coordination requirements overwhelm empowerment intent.

A Different Approach: Infrastructure Over Intent

If empowerment crashes into shared systems, what if we changed the systems instead of the people?

Here’s the pattern that keeps showing up: autonomy requires more than permission. It requires infrastructure that makes independence possible.

The shift: Autonomy requires infrastructure that makes independence possible, not just permission.

Three things seem to matter:

Infrastructure Element 1: Clarity Before Coordination

Most team dependencies exist because requirements are fuzzy. Fuzzy requirements = constant clarification = coordination overhead.

AI-driven decomposition forces clarity upfront. When you can’t hand-wave requirements to an AI copilot, you discover ambiguity earlier, before it creates dependencies.

The part most teams skip: this clarity work. They want to move fast, so they defer precision. But that deferred precision becomes coordination debt later.

Infrastructure Element 2: Trust Through Structure, Not Relationships

Traditional empowerment relies on trust built through relationships. But what about teams of people who’ve never worked together? What about global talent pools where relationship-building takes months?

Here’s where I’ve been influenced by how well-functioning DAOs think about this: bounded contexts.

The traditional approach tries to buy trust upfront. Heavy contracts. Extensive due diligence. Reference checks. You invest heavily before collaboration even starts, hoping you’ve assessed correctly.

The alternative: test trust through execution. Small, reversible experiments. Clear scope with explicit assumptions. Defined entry and exit criteria. Cheap failure if it doesn’t work out.

Trust for this context, not forever. Trust for this bounded collaboration, not a permanent commitment.

Outcome-driven smart contracts formalize these bounded agreements. Milestone-based payments tied to specific deliverables. Automated enforcement. Clear outcomes that are binary: done or not done.

It’s not that relationships don’t matter. But bounded, structural trust can enable collaboration before relational trust develops. You learn whether to expand the relationship through the work itself. And for distributed teams, that sequencing matters enormously.

Infrastructure Element 3: Independence Through Boundaries

Klein’s point about journey-centric vs. component-centric structures resonates. Component teams share everything. Journey teams own their slice end-to-end.

The architectural equivalent: work units that are independent by design. Clear inputs, clear outputs, minimal shared state.

This is where temporary collaboration structures come in. Think of them as time-limited teams assembled for specific outcomes, what some call “temporary DAOs.” Lifespan measured in weeks, not years. Clear objectives. Digitally verifiable outcomes.

When the bounded work is done, the structure dissolves. This is the opposite of permanent team structures that assume ongoing, indefinite collaboration.

AI makes this feasible at scale. When translating intent into executable rules becomes cheap enough, you can experiment with bounded collaborations that would have been too expensive to set up before.

Set up projects this way and teams can move without waiting. Not because you declared autonomy, but because the work itself doesn’t require ongoing coordination.

The Pattern: Bounded, Outcome-Driven, Time-Limited

The pattern keeps showing up: empowerment is an infrastructure problem, not a culture problem.

More specifically: empowerment seems to work when collaboration is bounded, outcome-driven, and time-limited.

Bounded Clear scope, explicit assumptions, defined entry and exit.

Outcome-driven Smart contracts tied to results, not activity.

Time-limited Collaboration structures with defined lifespans.

This is how DAOs work when they work well. And it’s the opposite of how most organizations think about teams.

Organizations spend enormous energy on culture change, leadership training, and alignment rituals. Meanwhile, the architecture of the work creates dependencies that make autonomy structurally impossible.

Klein’s observation feels right: large organizations with shared systems, interdependent teams, and component-based ownership may be fundamentally incompatible with true team empowerment.

The question is whether we keep trying to make empowerment work within those structures, or build different structures entirely.

Implications

Here’s where I’ve landed, at least for now:

Empowerment might not be something you grant. It might be something you build.

Not through permission or culture or training. Through architecture.

Most organizations can’t retrofit this.

But new projects? New teams? Distributed collaborations assembled for specific outcomes?

Those can be architected differently from the start.

That’s the bet at Rezoomex.

If empowerment keeps failing despite good intentions, maybe the problem isn’t empowerment at all.

What’s been your experience?

Sources

1. Why Most Product Teams Aren’t Really Empowered by Laura Klein, Nielsen Norman Group, January 9, 2026
2. EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan (2020)
3. Reducing the Trust Tax by Vinayak Joglekar