Why Coordination is Where Organisational Complexity Really Hides
This is Part 3 of my 'What it Takes to be an Adaptive Organisation' series.
Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner’s Octopus Organisation provides a useful metaphor for an adaptive system - one able to sense and respond through distributed parts while still moving coherently as a whole.
In the second article of this series, I highlighted the importance of ownership clarity as a condition for adaptability: teams need to know when to act, when to coordinate, and when to defer.
But this condition is not enough on its own. An Octopus is not effective simply because each arm can act independently. It is effective because those arms remain connected in a way that allows the whole organism to respond fluidly and without delay.
The same is true of organisations. An adaptive organisation is not simply one where teams can operate independently. It is one where teams can come together effectively when they need to, separate cleanly when they do not, and do both without unnecessary friction.
Coordination is Where Complexity Hides
Many organisations assume coordination is just the cost of doing business at scale. More teams mean more meetings, more dependencies mean more planning, more specialists mean more handoffs.
Some degree of coordination is inevitable, but it also accumulates gradually through design choices that seem reasonable in isolation:
A new approval step added for “safety”. Another stakeholder invited “just to keep informed.” A committee formed to manage cross-team priorities. A recurring meeting created due to overlapping responsibilities.
The system becomes busy, visible, and well-connected — but not necessarily adaptive.
The Hidden Cost of Poor Coordination
Poor coordination shows up in different ways:
Teams waiting for decisions that involve several groups.
Roadmaps shaped by negotiation rather than value.
Projects slowed by sequencing constraints rather than technical difficulty.
People spending more time aligning calendars than solving problems.
Decisions revisited because the right people were not involved early enough.
Together, these issues create drag, and drag matters most when conditions change, because the slower a system coordinates, the slower it adapts.
What Adaptive Coordination Looks Like
Coordination is not primarily a people problem; it’s a design problem concerned with:
How work is divided.
How responsibilities connect.
How information flows.
How decisions are made across boundaries.
How support is accessed.
How priorities are reconciled.
When these are designed intentionally, coordination becomes lighter, faster, and more predictable.
Adaptive organisations aim to coordinate by exception rather than by default. That means most teams can make progress independently most of the time, while clear mechanisms exist for moments when collaboration is genuinely required.
Practical Ways to Redesign Coordination:
1. Reduce unnecessary dependencies
The cleanest coordination is the coordination you no longer need.
Where teams rely on multiple others for routine progress, coordination costs rise quickly. This is often a signal that boundaries need to be revisited.
Can the scope be reshaped so that teams own more of the end-to-end flow?
Can shared services become self-service platforms?
Can repeated requests become products with clear interfaces?
Reducing dependency load is often more powerful than improving meeting efficiency.
2. Make collaboration modes explicit
Not all coordination should look the same. Some work needs close collaboration, some needs lightweight consultation, some simply needs a service interface while some needs temporary joint focus.
When every interaction defaults to the same model - usually meetings and messaging - coordination becomes noisy. Adaptive organisations are clearer about how teams should interact in different situations.
3. Separate routine coordination from exceptional coordination
Not every decision deserves the same ceremony. When urgent and non-urgent work enters the same planning forums, governance groups, or prioritisation processes, this creates queues. Instead, create faster paths for genuinely time-sensitive cross-team work, while keeping routine demand lightweight and predictable.
4. Use platforms to remove repeated negotiation
Where teams repeatedly depend on the same capabilities, coordination can often be reduced through platform thinking.
Self-service environments.
Reusable tooling.
Clear APIs.
Standard patterns.
Accessible expertise.
Platforms are valuable not just because they centralise capability, but because they remove recurring coordination overhead.
5. Review meetings as system symptoms
Recurring meetings often reveal where the design is compensating for itself. Some meetings are valuable, while others exist because ownership is unclear, dependencies are excessive, or decisions lack trusted paths.
Rather than asking “can we shorten this meeting?” ask:
Why does this meeting need to exist at all?
That question often reveals deeper redesign opportunities.
The Role of Leadership
Leadership in adaptive organisations still matters deeply, but less as traffic control and more as system stewardship. The role is not to personally coordinate everything, it is to create conditions for effective coordination without constant intervention.
That means:
Clarifying priorities.
Removing structural friction.
Investing in enabling capabilities.
Resolving persistent cross-boundary tensions.
Ensuring teams are not drowning in coordination load.
When coordination is well-designed, teams do not spend much time talking about it. The right people connect when needed, dependencies are manageable, and cross-team work feels possible rather than painful. This is the result of deliberate design.
Closing
Adaptive organisations are not those with the most communication. They are those with the least unnecessary coordination. They create systems where teams can move independently when they should, collaborate effectively when they must, and do both without grinding progress to a halt.
If ownership clarity tells teams when to act, coordination design determines how easily the whole organisation can move together. And in a changing environment, that can make all the difference.
Next in the Series
A system can move smoothly and still head in the wrong direction. Next, I’ll explore why adaptiveness depends on knowing what matters.
