The Tomato Juice-Effect: How tiny dependencies quietly slow down million-dollar projects

Imagine standing at the airport, ready for the trip you have been waiting for all year. Your suitcase is packed, your passport is ready, boarding is about to begin — and suddenly an announcement comes through the speakers:

“The flight is delayed because the catering team is still waiting for the tomato juice cups.”

Completely ridiculous, right? And yet this is exactly how many organisations operate every single day.

One team cannot start because another department still needs to approve something. That department cannot move because they are waiting for data from a third team. Meanwhile, everyone attends meetings, sends polite follow-up messages, drinks increasingly cold coffee and somehow stays “busy” all day long while the actual work barely moves forward.

This is one of the biggest hidden problems inside organisations:

*Most companies manage people. Very few actually manage the *flow of work.**

And that distinction changes everything. Because teams often look efficient in isolation. A development team may finish a feature in two days — but if that ticket then sits untouched for three weeks waiting for approval, compliance review, design input or another dependency, the customer experiences none of that speed. From the outside, the organisation still feels painfully slow.

This is where dependencies become dangerous. Not because dependencies themselves are automatically bad, but because every additional handover introduces:

• waiting time,
• communication loss,
• coordination overhead,
• and uncertainty.

One of the most common bottlenecks I see is the “specialist team effect.” For example, one UX or security team suddenly becomes responsible for supporting ten other teams simultaneously. At that point, the entire organisation unconsciously starts moving at the speed of the bottleneck.

And the frustrating part is that nobody initially notices where the real slowdown comes from, because locally every team still appears productive.

This is why Agile Coaches often spend less time optimising individuals and much more time visualising dependencies across the system itself.

One of the most powerful things you can do is Dependency Mapping — literally making visible:

• who depends on whom,
• where work waits,
• where approvals pile up,
• and where value flow repeatedly breaks down.

And honestly, once organisations map this transparently, it often looks less like a streamlined process and more like a giant tangled ball of wool a cat aggressively attacked for three hours straight. But that visibility matters. Because you cannot improve flow if nobody sees where the waiting actually happens.

And this is also why cross-team collaboration becomes so important. The goal is not gathering departments together to ask:

“Who caused the delay?”

The goal is asking:

“What is blocking flow — and how do we remove it together?”

The healthiest organisations are usually not the ones with the busiest people. They are the ones where work moves smoothly with minimal waiting, minimal handovers and minimal organisational friction. Because a project that spends 90% of its time waiting is not truly agile. It is simply a waiting queue with daily standups.

Boom!