Asymmetric Coordination Under Feedback Absence

When one party in a coordination dyad falls silent after an initial signal, the remaining party bears the full adjustment cost. This paper applies General Coordination Dynamics (GCD) to characterize the resulting pathology: runaway elaboration of the original signal into increasingly complex coordination protocols that consume coordination capacity (Kc ) without feedback calibration. The analysis formalizes the structural equivalence of this dynamic across theological, romantic, legal, and ethical domains. It derives the conditions under which elaboration becomes self-sustaining, identifies the optimal stopping problem created by feedback absence, connects the dynamic to the Two-Generals Problem in distributed systems theory, and specifies the trade-off framework that replaces certainty-seeking with viability-seeking under irreducible uncertainty. The framework predicts that systems coordinating with silent parties will exhibit characteristic failure modes—over-elaboration, projection, and sunk-cost entrenchment—that are structurally identical across scales and domains