Sync or Drift
The hidden physics of sales team performance
In 1998, two mathematicians published a short paper that changed how scientists think about collective behavior. Steven Strogatz and Duncan Watts weren’t studying organizations. They were studying fireflies.
Specifically, they wanted to know why thousands of fireflies in Southeast Asian mangrove forests blink in perfect unison. No conductor. No central signal. Just individual insects, somehow falling into step across miles of swamp.
Their answer was elegant: synchronization doesn’t require central control. It requires shared signals and local connections. Each firefly adjusts its rhythm based on the fireflies nearby. Over time, the whole system locks into phase.
The same mathematics explains how heart cells coordinate their contractions, how power grids stabilize across thousands of generators, and how neurons fire in synchronized waves across the brain.
It also explains why some sales teams feel like orchestras and others feel like open mic night.
You’ve seen both versions.
In one team, deals progress predictably. Messaging stays tight. Discovery calls sound like variations on a theme rather than improvised monologues. Internal updates feel fluid. Forecasting becomes almost boring—not because nothing is happening, but because nothing is surprising.
In another team, everything feels reactive. Reps invent their own talk tracks. Handoffs require constant translation. The pipeline lurches from crisis to crisis. You spend half your time in damage control and the other half trying to figure out what’s actually happening.
The difference isn’t talent. It’s synchronization.
High-performing teams don’t coordinate because someone is watching. They coordinate because the system makes coordination easy. Clear expectations, common language, predictable rhythms—these are the shared signals that let individual contributors adjust to each other without constant oversight.
What looks like “momentum” is often phase alignment. Everyone moving to the same internal clock.
Here’s what most sales leaders get wrong: they try to create alignment through inspection.
More pipeline reviews. Tighter forecast calls. Detailed deal documentation. The logic seems sound—if you watch closely enough, you can catch problems early and correct them.
But inspection doesn’t create synchronization. It creates compliance. And compliance is exhausting to maintain.
Strogatz’s insight points to a different approach. You don’t force fireflies to blink together by monitoring each one individually. You create conditions where synchronization emerges naturally.
For sales teams, those conditions are deceptively simple: weekly rhythms for forecasting and one-on-ones. A shared language for qualification stages. Dashboards everyone can see. Defined standards for next steps. Reliable handoff protocols between functions.
None of this is revolutionary. But the cumulative effect is. When signals are consistent, teams self-organize around them. Alignment becomes the default, not the exception.
Strogatz uses the term “coupling” to describe how strongly different parts of a system influence each other. Tightly coupled systems converge. Loosely coupled systems drift.
This is the precise mechanism behind messaging breakdown.
When coupling is weak, every rep develops their own version of the value proposition. Discovery varies wildly. Qualification criteria become suggestions. Forecasts swing based on who’s optimistic that week.
When coupling is strong, the “why” sounds the same from every voice. Opportunities follow predictable paths. Internal teams know what to expect. The system behaves consistently even when individuals differ.
Most leaders diagnose this as a “messaging problem” and respond with more training. But training alone is weak coupling—a one-time signal that decays quickly.
Stronger coupling comes from ongoing connection: shared call reviews where teams hear each other’s approaches. Repeatable templates that anchor communication. Objection-handling libraries built from actual conversations. Qualification criteria that get reinforced in every pipeline review.
The goal isn’t uniformity. It’s coherence. Enough shared signal that individual variation stays within productive bounds.
The Watts-Strogatz model also revealed something surprising about network structure.
Most networks aren’t purely random or purely ordered. They’re “small worlds”—clusters of local connections with a few long-range links bridging distant parts. Think of how you might know someone in another city only through a mutual friend.
Sales organizations have the same topology. Territory pods, tenure groups, product specialists—these are local clusters. But certain people serve as bridges: regional leaders, solutions engineers, overlay specialists, that one senior rep everyone calls for advice.
This structure explains why habits spread faster than training materials. Ideas, behaviors, and attitudes move through the network along existing relationships. One high performer’s approach can ripple across a team. So can one toxic attitude.
The implication for leaders is that network design matters as much as individual development. Cross-pollinating strong performers with newer hires creates learning pathways. Identifying natural connectors—people who share ideas without being asked—amplifies good practices. Isolating consistently negative influences before they reshape local culture protects the whole system.
You’re not just managing people. You’re shaping how information flows between them.
Strogatz spent much of his career studying nonlinear dynamics—systems where outputs aren’t proportional to inputs. Small changes can trigger sudden shifts. Big pushes can produce nothing. Progress happens in jumps, not gradual slopes.
Sales performance follows the same pattern.
A rep struggles with discovery for months. You coach, you model, you review calls together. Nothing seems to stick. Then one conversation clicks, something shifts internally, and suddenly they’re different. The improvement wasn’t gradual. It was a phase transition—a threshold crossed.
The same dynamics appear at the team level. A new product motion stalls for weeks, then accelerates rapidly once a few early wins create social proof. A territory looks stable until a key departure disrupts relationships, and suddenly deals fall apart across the board.
Leaders who expect linear improvement get frustrated. They push harder when progress stalls, assuming more effort will produce more results. But the system doesn’t work that way.
The better approach is watching early indicators: meetings booked, first-call conversion rates, the quality of next-step commitments, how quickly reps follow up after discovery. These signals tell you whether the system is approaching a threshold—whether the conditions for a phase transition are building.
When you intervene at the right moment, you change trajectories. Wait too long, and you’re just reacting to outcomes that were already determined.
There’s a darker version of this dynamic. Strogatz calls them “attractors”—stable patterns that systems settle into and resist leaving.
Not all attractors are good.
A team can fall into a pattern of reactive prospecting: chasing whatever inbound appears, never building systematic outreach. Or messy handoffs that everyone complains about but nobody fixes. Or weak discovery that gets compensated for with late-stage discounting. Or last-minute heroics that feel exciting but aren’t scalable.
Once these patterns settle, they become self-reinforcing. Not because the team lacks talent, but because the system rewards familiar behaviors. The attractor has gravity.
You don’t escape a bad attractor with motivation. Pep talks don’t change system dynamics. You need to alter the underlying rules.
Reset qualification standards so weak opportunities get caught earlier. Redesign territory focus to reduce reactive behavior. Add pressure on early-stage pipeline quality rather than late-stage deal rescue. Change incentives for multi-product attachment. Build stronger manager cadences that catch problems before they compound.
A new attractor appears when the rules that created the old one change. The team doesn’t need to try harder. They need a different system to operate within.
This is the Strogatz principle applied to leadership: systems don’t need perfect parts to behave well. They need the right structure, signals, and connections.
You shape cadence—the rhythms that create predictability. You shape language—the shared vocabulary that enables coherence. You shape information flow—the dashboards and updates that keep everyone aligned. You shape network structure—the connections that determine how knowledge moves. You shape incentives—the rewards that pull behavior toward better attractors.
When those elements align, performance emerges on its own. Not because you pushed harder, but because you engineered an environment where excellence is the natural outcome.
Sales teams are more distributed, more specialized, and more interdependent than they’ve ever been. Leaders can’t rely on charisma or constant inspection. They have to build systems where predictability emerges from clear rules, not heroic oversight.
Strogatz didn’t study sales. He studied fireflies, neurons, and power grids. But the mathematics is the same.
Individual parts don’t need perfect information or central control. They need a few shared signals and the right connections. Get those right, and synchronization happens on its own.
Get them wrong, and you drift.