This is a really good description of a natural tension any engineering team has to deal with. I specially liked the framing of pair programming as a powerful hybrid.

A challenge the OP doesn't touch on is the need for individual focus _during_ coordination events. For example, someone is presenting their design ideas to an audience who's seeing them for the first time. In order for the coordination to be productive, the audience needs to be good at focusing in realtime to grok the ideas presented to them. It'd be unfortunate to rely on your team's ability to pull off a burst of focus on demand. Some can do this well, some can't, and you only water down your coordination if you rely on it too much.

I've read about and quite like writing-heavy workflows, e.g. presenter writes and shares a 4-6 pager, or meeting starts with people silently reading a memo. The async-ness and the reliance on written word pulls a lot of weight when there's too much depth/breadth involved; the kind of thing that happens a handful of times a quarter.

But this is hard to pull off consistently every week for small iterations that nonetheless need coordination on cognitively demanding topics.

How do folks deal with this?