If you can't admit the problem. Can't stare it down. Can't comprehend it. Then I don't know how you can ever solve it. I try to avoid these places, not easy though.
Are there any examples of large organizations that don't have this problem? I can imagine places with small teams that are basically isolated that can operate efficiently, but once you scale to point where dozens to hundreds of teams needing to cooperate, it seems like all you have is tradeoffs and fundamental coordination and scaling issues. I've never heard of a big org that didn't have some flavor of disfunction resulting from that kind of complexity. Some places seem to be "less-bad" but that doesn't mean good or efficient.
Jim Keller mentioned this problem in the hardware space. Basically when people breach the interface design and couple things and how that coupling limits your ability to grow the design.
When he helped set the tone for the Zen architecture he took AMDs existing people, set them on a more aggressive path and one of the cardinal tenants was you could not cheat on the interfaces. This is one of the nuggets you can pull from his interviews.
It's possible. It happens. And the end results can be industry changing.
