Seeding Wisdom

Coordination carries a threefold meaning: a way of Being through which we bring actions into relationship, disclose what matters, and transfer Being from situation to situation.

In this sense, coordination involves coordinating action, disclosing significance, and providing continuity of Being.

Part 1 explored coordination as a largely invisible human capacity and introduced six dimensions through which it operates. The table below provides a brief reminder, with an outcome and two practices for each.

We can understand these dimensions—and even become highly competent at generating action—while relating to people as objects to manage.

In Part 2, we explore the deeper challenge of coordination: How do we cultivate coordination as a way of being with one another as co-creators, rather than another technique for getting things done?

Mindset: Coordinating Being

To coordinate well requires a mindset shift from understanding action to coordinating action. Below is a fundamental competency that we use in our work with clients. Read both options and notice what you see differently in each, and even what each might evoke.

• Option 1 takes a psychological perspective, centering understanding.
• Option 2 takes an ontological perspective, centering being in action.

This distinction is subtle but consequential. Option 2 reveals observable and actionable qualities that invite clearer conversations and generate new possibilities for action.

Option 1 emphasizes much of what we conventionally associate with good leadership and teamwork: clear communication, shared understanding, responsibility for tasks, and proactive problem-solving.

These matter, yet embedded in this perspective are assumptions worth examining: alignment primarily involves shared understanding, responsibility is demonstrated by completing tasks, and breakdowns are largely communication problems.

Option 2 shifts the ground beneath these assumptions:

— Coordination is not primarily about understanding, but commitments.

— Breakdowns are not simply miscommunications, but often breakdowns in agreements.

— Reliability is not demonstrated by intention or effort, but by honoring one’s word and agreements.

— Language doesn’t merely describe reality, but participates in creating it.

Rather than assuming that we know what responsibility and accountability mean, Option 2 makes them observable through the commitments people make, fulfill, decline, or renegotiate.

Ultimately, the two perspectives orient us toward different questions:

Option 1: Did we communicate clearly and reach a shared understanding?

Option 2: What did we actually commit to—and is that commitment being honored?

The distinction is not understanding versus action. The shift is recognizing that understanding alone does not coordinate action. Commitments do.

To coordinate well requires a mindset shift from
understanding action to coordinating action.

Control vs. Commitment and Co-Creation

In an environment oriented toward Option 2, we begin to see an organization as a network of commitments and agreements, generated through requests, promises, offers, conditions of satisfaction, and the fulfillment or renegotiation of commitments.

1. Networks of Agreements

When an organization is viewed as a network of commitments and agreements, coordination can no longer be added afterward to make work happen. This becomes the way work happens.

This idea goes deeper than it first appears. Jeffrey Ford and Laurie Ford, in their paper “Conversation and the Authoring of Change” (2002), argue that organizations should not be understood as entities within which networks of conversations occur. Rather, the network of conversations is the organization. There is no organization independent of what is authored, maintained, and referenced through its conversations.

Consider what that means. What we call a department, function, or process may appear to be a fixed organizational structure, but beneath it, recurring conversations generate and fulfill commitments. “Customer service,” for example, exists because recurrent requests for service generate predictable conversations and commitments, which eventually become embodied in roles, practices, departments, and systems.

The structure we see is partially the residue of repeated conversations over time.

This makes coordination foundational, not supplemental. Requests, promises, offers, agreements, and conditions of satisfaction are not simply communications occurring inside the organization. They are among the ways the organization continually authors and sustains itself.

When an organization is viewed as a network of commitments and agreements, coordination can no longer be added afterward to make work happen. This becomes the way work happens.

Yet, I see this misunderstanding of coordination repeatedly in my work with clients.

Coordination becomes an afterthought—another task we must complete to execute the “real” work—rather than how commitments become action, and organizations continue to be created.

How do we create such an environment?

Language is only part of the answer. The other concerns how we organize our Being with others. Who are we being as co-creators?

This requires some unlearning.

2. Being at Choice*

I recall first learning about this generative nature of coordination about 26 years ago. It was revelatory. My efficiency and effectiveness shot up. I learned what to focus on to produce results, how to manage impediments and setbacks, and how to take greater ownership of what was within my control: time, actions, outcomes, and direction.

But somewhere along the way, I became so focused on coordinating action effectively that I lost sight of something fundamental: Being in Action.

There is an important difference between optimizing action and coordinating humans in action. Processes can be optimized mechanically. Humans coordinate organically.

When we forget that distinction, coordination can quietly become control.

Control attempts to manage actions toward predetermined results. Coordination creates conditions through which people who are at choice can make and fulfill commitments with one another. Being at choice is reciprocal. I recognize myself as free to choose while granting that same freedom to you.

From this perspective, context matters as much as content. Before we speak, we are already listening: to patterns, signs, signals, meanings, concerns, possibilities, and what may be emerging between us. What matters is not simply what we say or how we say it but the context from which we are speaking and listening.

3. Coordination Beyond Certainty

Coordination is built through freely generated commitments, not optimized compliance.

This is why conversation is so central. The dimensions of coordination described above come alive through conversation: speaking and listening, making requests and offers, observing signs and signals, creating agreements, and listening for the meaning that can move action.

Seen this way, coordination does more than reveal what we are committed to doing. It reveals something about how we connect in creating it.

We can certainly use coordination to do more. However, when we become attentive to the human condition beneath our conversations, coordination also offers the possibility to become more.

Making that shift requires surrendering our attachment to control. It asks us to enter the field of coordination differently—not simply trying to make action happen but allowing what emerges and those with whom we are working to influence the action we generate.

We don’t surrender action. We surrender the demand for certainty and the assumption that action must be controlled—both products of a mechanistic view.

The Magic of Coordination: Trust

1. Coordination Builds Trust

Whether we recognize it or not, humans constantly assess others for trust. We scan for cues—first in an instant and then through behavior patterns over time.

In his book Building Trust, Fernando Flores (2003) argues that trust in someone’s promises, agreements, and commitments rests largely on three assessments: competence, sincerity, and reliability. If you review the six dimensions of coordination, you’ll find these assessments embedded in dimensions 2, 3, and 6, with the other dimensions serving as important enabling factors.

Every opportunity to coordinate action is also an opportunity to build trust. Becoming someone who coordinates action well creates a context for being trustworthy. Over time, our commitments and how we fulfill them become evidence others use to answer a fundamental question: Can I count on you?

2. Eroding Trust

Our digital world of speed, transactions, shortcuts, and disconnection is normalizing new ways of relating: ghosting, phubbing, breadcrumbing, curving, and subbing.

Beneath the clever names are behaviors with real consequences—ignoring rather than acknowledging, dividing our attention rather than being present, keeping others engaged without commitment, avoiding a candid no, and talking around people rather than with them.

This is why seemingly simple gestures can say so much.

Confirming a calendar invitation signals your participation. Acknowledging a Slack post or text with an emoji signals that a communication has been received. These gestures do more than acknowledge receipt; they cultivate connection by reducing uncertainty in another person’s world.

That simple signal says: You needn’t wonder whether I saw this. You can count on my attention to the matter.

The underlying message is: You can count on me.

As generative beings, we are always co-creating intentionally or “accidentally.” Leaving a post, email, text, or voicemail unanswered—often called ghosting—can send the opposite signal. At a minimum, we create uncertainty. Was my message received? Is there an agreement? Will anything happen? Can I rely on this person?

What many leaders fail to recognize is that coordination requires everyone’s participation. This is why coordination must ultimately become cultural: a shared way of communicating with candor, creating agreements, becoming reliable, generating futures, connecting, and collaborating.

Developing a strategy without such a culture is like placing five hundred pounds of paper on a fragile table. When the structure collapses, we often diagnose failure as a lack of understanding or poor execution. But underneath may be something more fundamental: a collapse in credibility caused by missing agreements, weak commitments, unclear conditions of satisfaction, and the absence of coordination as a cultural norm.

Coordination creates trust that can bind strategy to culture.

Coordination must ultimately become cultural: a shared way of communicating with candor, creating agreements, becoming reliable, generating futures, connecting, and collaborating.

3. Trust Creates Responsiveness

There’s more. Trust is not merely a byproduct of coordination. The trust generated through coordination increases our capacity to coordinate.

When people trust one another’s competence, sincerity, and reliability, less energy is spent managing uncertainty. Difficult conversations surface earlier. Breakdowns are addressed without immediately becoming threats. Commitments can be questioned, renegotiated, and restored because candor, itself, has become part of how the group works.

Coordination builds trust, and trust enables more responsive coordination.

In such a culture, coordination becomes an organizing principle for creating high-performing teams, fulfilling commitments, deepening connections, and generating futures together. People know they can surface what is impeding action rather than work around it, hide it, or allow it to become someone else’s problem.

Over time, people want to participate in environments like this. They want to belong to teams where commitments matter, contributions are meaningful, and collective effort reliably produces results. In today’s increasingly transactional and disconnected world, the combination of belonging and generative success can be enormously attractive.

This is where trust transforms our understanding of velocity.

Velocity isn’t simply greater speed. It is the freedom of movement created by reducing the unnecessary friction of confusion and uncertainty. Less energy is consumed in checking, chasing, protecting, interpreting, recovering, and wondering. More energy becomes available for responding, creating, and moving commitments forward.

The result is not simply a faster organization. It is more reliable and responsive.

The Power of Coordination

Once coordination moves beyond logistics and control and cultivates trust, we are ready to explore its deeper power.

This isn’t power in the conventional sense of greater control, force, or authority. It arises from how we organize ourselves in relationship to circumstances so action can emerge with less force and friction.

Consider two presidential transitions confronting the same unexpected event: a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Scenario A. A president enters office with a transition team, managing the conventional work of preparing the new government. Six months later, a Supreme Court vacancy unexpectedly occurs.

A team is given 90 days to identify and vet candidates before presenting three finalists. The president then takes 30 days to interview them and select a nominee. Meanwhile, the president explains that a process is underway and that a nominee will be announced when it is complete.

Scenario B. A second president organizes the transition into three categories: conventional issues, immediate needs, and long-term or unexpected possibilities. The third team is given a specific mandate: identify and vet three potential Supreme Court nominees should a vacancy occur.

Six months later, the same vacancy occurs. Three candidates have already been vetted, and the president can announce that a nominee will be selected within 30 days.

Which scenario feels more empowering?

Velocity isn’t simply greater speed. It is the freedom of movement created by reducing the unnecessary friction of confusion and uncertainty

More Than Planning

Both involve good planning, so something more than planning is at work.

Scenario A responds to an event. Scenario B responds to a possibility.

This highlights the significance of Temporality. The second team has brought a possible future into the present and organized action around it. They haven’t predicted the future. They have coordinated with its possibility.

Within coordinated action, a declaration establishes the context—we will organize for consequential possibilities—and commitments organize people around that context, creating capability before circumstances demand it.

The power of coordination is not that it gives us greater control over what will happen. It expands the possibility and readiness for what might happen.

Coordination isn’t fundamentally about getting people to do things. It’s about how humans create futures together.

The Being of Coordination

Across these two essays, we have moved from seeing coordination as a largely invisible human capacity to recognizing it as a way of being with one another. We coordinate through language, but language alone is not enough.

We bring our awareness, intentions, competence, clarity, candor, temporality, and countless variables into every conversation as we make requests, create agreements, give our word, and bring possibilities into existence.

Beneath all this is something even more fundamental: how we choose to be with one another.

We can coordinate through control or choice. We can seek compliance or cultivate commitment. We can treat people as resources to manage or as co-creators with whom we generate possibilities. The difference is not simply philosophical. It determines the quality of our commitments, the trust we create, and ultimately what becomes possible together.

Trust is where the magic and power of coordination meet.

Magic emerges when people discover that they can count on one another—when commitments generate trust, trust reduces uncertainty, and coordination becomes self-generating.

Power emerges not from greater control over circumstances but from how we organize ourselves in relationship to them. We become more able to meet uncertainty, respond to what emerges, and create possibilities before circumstances demand them.

Perhaps this is why coordination is so easy to overlook. When it works, we acknowledge the accomplishment, the strategy, the team, the relationship, and the performance. We rarely see the thousands of acts of listening, choosing, committing, speaking, adjusting, and fulfilling that enabled them.

Yet, beneath them is this extraordinary human capacity.

We coordinate not simply to get things done. We coordinate to create what none of us could create alone. In doing so, we become more capable of creating together.

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*Being at choice describes a stance or condition: remaining present to what is while being available to choose.

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1- VIEW OUR RELATED RESOURCES & BLOGS:

• The One Capacity You’ve Ignored Far Too Long—Part 1
• Generative Communication: A Model for Generating Commitment, part 2
• Trust: Leadership Intelligence, part 2
• What’s Growing in Your Conversational Garden?

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