I believe you are an unusual and competent guy. And work IS a system. Coordination is important. Some years back, process management was the thing (although nobody knew how to do it; they were too obsessed with maintaining the hierarchy.

The bottom line is this: people generally know how to do their jobs, and certainly understand their part better than managers. That’s why they were hired, that’s what they do every day. No offense to the managers. But the managers need to know their jobs.

And it’s not to be boss. It’s to make sure that the people who work for them have the resources and support to do their jobs.

Coordination is one of them. Really, what needs to be done is that the process should be diagrammed—a chart created and polished by the people who do the work, showing how things are currently being done. NO JUDGEMENTS!

And once this is visible, the people who do the work can work ON the system, looking for better ways to coordinate and get things done together.

There’s more to this; for example, some (not too hard) statistics can help people monitor and figure out when something has gone out of whack and differentiate that from normal variation.

But I absolutely know how to do all this. Nobody cared, though, in the 1980s and nobody cares now. What most managers (and the executives above them) care about is maintaining the hierarchy and placing blame for failures, usually on those who work for them.

You are too good for your job. You actually care about the work.