How we work

The name is borrowed from physics, but what it means for us is a question we meet in every piece of work: where is connection needed, and where does it get in the way of acting?

With too little coordination, work gets lost between people and teams. With too much mutual dependence, everyone is waiting on everyone else. We find out what coordination the work requires, and where people need to be able to get on by themselves.

• Requests and commitments

  Who is asking what of whom? Is it clear what is needed, by when, and on what terms? A request only becomes an agreement once the other person has understood it and committed to it.

  Speech act theory; J.L. Austin, John Searle, Fernando Flores, Bart Geurts

  Further reading: Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962) · Searle, Speech Acts (1969) · Winograd & Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986) · Geurts, Communication as commitment sharing (2019)

• What each role has to protect

  Different roles have different things to protect: the integrity of a system, the budget, the delivery date. Those responsibilities can conflict even when everyone does their job well. We find out what each person is answerable for and whether the agreements leave room for it.

  Perceptual Control Theory; William T. Powers, Kent McClelland, Warren Mansell

  Further reading: Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception (1973) · McClelland, The collective control of perceptions (2004) · Mansell (ed.), The Interdisciplinary Handbook of Perceptual Control Theory (2020)

• How pieces of work depend on each other

  Sometimes a shared plan is enough for people to get on by themselves. Sometimes a careful hand-over is needed. And sometimes people have to keep adjusting to each other while the work is under way. We check whether the way they work together fits those dependencies.

  Organisation theory; James D. Thompson, Henry Mintzberg, Thomas Malone, Kevin Crowston

  Further reading: Thompson, Organizations in Action (1967) · Malone & Crowston, The interdisciplinary study of coordination (1994) · Crowston, Rubleske & Howison, Coordination theory: a ten-year retrospective (2006)

• How coordination actually happens

  The org chart shows who reports to whom. In practice, people also go to other colleagues to get things done. We look at how that network works.

  Network theory; Mark Granovetter, Ronald Burt

  Further reading: Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties (1973) · Burt, Structural Holes (1992) · Burt, Structural holes and good ideas (2004)

• What makes cooperation possible and sustainable

  What makes sense for each team on its own can turn out badly for the whole. We examine what cooperation yields, what time and resources it takes, who carries the burden, and how past experience colours the next round.

  Game theory and economics; Robert Axelrod, Elinor Ostrom, Ronald Coase

  Further reading: Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (1984) · Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990) · Ostrom, Beyond Markets and States, Nobel lecture (2009) · Coase, The Nature of the Firm (1937)

• What reports make visible

  Every report, dashboard and meeting works with a limited set of categories: these headings, these colours, these questions. What does not fit those categories can drop out of view. Often that is exactly what the recipient needs in order to act. We look at which categories are in use, what they leave out, which uncertainties matter for the decision, and whether the categories themselves need to change.

  Information theory; Claude Shannon

  Further reading: Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) · Van der Lubbe, Information Theory (1997) · Cover & Thomas, Elements of Information Theory (2006)

• How talk leads to action

  A decision does not carry itself out. Who is in a position to act? Have the people who are needed committed to doing it? Are preparation, time and resources in place? We check whether conversations and decisions end in workable agreements, whether lessons from the work inform the next decisions, and whether course is corrected when they do.

  Cybernetics and control theory; W. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Klaus Krippendorff

  Further reading: Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956) · Beer, Diagnosing the System for Organizations (1985) · Von Foerster, Understanding Understanding (2003) · Maturana & Varela, The Tree of Knowledge (1987) · Krippendorff, The Semantic Turn (2006)

A picture of who needs what from whom, where it fails to connect, and why. That picture can be traced back to the documents and conversations it rests on; those involved can add to it and correct it. The picture does not decide what should happen. It opens up options, and together we weigh who a change would help, what it asks of others, and who can commit to it.

We start from concrete questions in the work. We examine what happens, describe recurring patterns and develop explanations. We use those to try out changes together with the people involved.

What happens then? What helps, what stays stuck, what had we misunderstood? With those experiences we revise our way of working and our theory. So practice and research develop together, as a helix: we return to the work with new insights and new questions. By making our concepts and explanations explicit, others can use, discuss and test them.

Along the way we develop our own theory of coordination around four terms. As questions for an organisation, not as definitions:

• Distinction: which differences and categories do we use to understand a situation, and what do they leave out of view?
• Coupling: how does what one person does affect what others do, and how do their responses feed back?
• Retention: what is kept and stays available, and how does it shape later action?
• Finitude: what limits do time, resources and attention set, and what cannot wait?