Coordination Costs More Than the Work

Category: Organisations and systems Adding people to make sure nothing is missed eventually costs more than the work itself.

There was a task that should have taken an afternoon.

It was not complicated. One person, given a clear brief and a free afternoon, could have done it and moved on. But it touched three teams, and it mattered, and someone — reasonably — did not want anything to fall through the cracks. So a working group was formed. Not a big one. Four people to start, one from each team that the task touched, plus the person who had raised it in the first place. Five, then. A sensible number. Small enough to be nimble, large enough to make sure nothing was missed.

The first meeting was scheduled for the following week, because that was the first slot all five could make. It ran for an hour and produced, mainly, a shared understanding of the problem and a set of actions, most of which were “go away and check with my team.” The actions were checked. Three of the five teams, it turned out, had a stake nobody had mentioned, so the next meeting added two more people to cover them. Seven, now. The next slot that worked for all seven was a fortnight out.

By the third meeting the group spent most of its hour reconciling what had changed since the second — one team had reorganised, one of the original five had moved on and sent a replacement who needed bringing up to speed, and a decision made in the first meeting had to be revisited because the person who would actually do that part of the work had not been in the room for it. There was a shared document now, and a channel, and a standing slot in the calendar. There was a person, unofficially, whose job had become keeping the group’s understanding of itself up to date — chasing the notes, merging the versions, reminding everyone what had been agreed.

The task — the afternoon’s work — was eventually done. It was done, in the end, by one person, in an afternoon, much as it could have been at the start. By then the group had met six times, exchanged a few hundred messages, and consumed, conservatively, several working weeks of collective attention. Nobody could point to the moment it had gone wrong, because nothing had gone wrong, exactly. Every meeting had been reasonable. Every addition had been justified. Each person had been added precisely so that nothing would be missed. And the sum of all that care was a machine that spent vastly more effort talking about the work than the work would ever have taken to do.

What is worth sitting with is that the instinct behind every step was good. Nobody was empire-building. Nobody wanted the meetings. Each person added was added by someone trying to be thorough, trying to be inclusive, trying to make sure the right people were in the room. The disaster — and several working weeks for an afternoon’s task is, quietly, a disaster — was assembled entirely out of conscientiousness.

The Principle

Coordination is not free, and its cost does not rise gently as you add people — it rises faster than the people do. Every person added to make sure nothing is missed brings their own need to be aligned, updated, consulted and reconciled, and past a surprisingly low number the effort the group spends keeping itself in sync exceeds the effort of the task it was assembled to do. Adding capacity to a coordination problem does not relieve it. It feeds it.

The thing that makes this so easy to walk into is that the logic of each addition is impeccable. Another person genuinely does reduce the chance that something specific is overlooked. That is true. What the logic ignores is the cost on the other side of the ledger — the cost that does not show up as a missed thing, but as a meeting, a thread, a version, a reconciliation, a person who now has to be told. Each new member is one more node that every other node has to stay connected to.

And connections, not people, are the thing that grows dangerously. Two people have one line between them. Five people have ten. Ten people have forty-five. The work to be done grew not at all when you went from five to ten; it was the same afternoon’s task throughout. But the work of staying coordinated roughly quadrupled, silently, while everyone congratulated themselves on being thorough. The group does not notice this happening because no single conversation feels wasteful. It is the number of conversations, multiplying out of sight, that does the damage.

Why It Is Inevitable

It is inevitable because the cost of coordination is paid in a different currency from the benefit, and only one of those currencies is ever counted.

The benefit of adding a person is legible and specific. You can name it: Priya will catch the licensing issue; without her we might miss it. It is a concrete risk, attached to a named person, easy to argue for and almost impossible to argue against — because to argue against it is to argue in favour of missing something, and nobody wants to be the one who said the licensing issue did not matter. So the additions are always easy to justify one at a time.

The cost, by contrast, is diffuse and unattributable. It is not paid by the person who proposed the addition; it is paid by everyone, slightly, in the form of one more update to read, one more opinion to accommodate, one more diary to align with, one more “let me just check with” before anything can move. No single increment of that cost is large enough to object to. You cannot stand up in a meeting and say “I refuse to be coordinated with.” The cost is real and it is enormous in aggregate, but it never presents a bill anyone can point at, and so it is never weighed against the benefit. The two sides of the trade are not even looked at on the same page.

It compounds because coordination begets coordination. Once the group is large enough that its members cannot all hold the same picture in their heads, you need an artefact to hold it for them — a document, a tracker, a status page. The artefact has to be maintained, which is work. The maintenance has to be coordinated, which is more work. Someone has to keep the others’ understanding current, which is a job that did not exist when the task was one person’s, and which produces nothing the customer would ever pay for. The group starts spending effort on the upkeep of the group. It develops an interior life, and that interior life is hungry.

And there is a deeper reason it cannot easily be stopped: the meeting feels like progress. An hour spent aligning, updating and reconciling feels productive in a way that an hour of one person quietly doing the task does not, because the meeting is visible, social, and full of the sensation of momentum — decisions reached, actions assigned, everyone leaning in. The actual work, done alone, is invisible until it is finished. So the organisation systematically mistakes the activity of coordination for the work, rewards the appearance of it, and fills the calendar with the very thing that is crowding out the thing it is about. The meeting about the work feels more like work than the work does. That is the trap, and it is baited with everyone’s good intentions.

How It Shows Up

• A task that one person could do in an afternoon acquires a working group, a channel, and a recurring slot
• More than half of every meeting is spent reconciling what has changed since the last meeting, not advancing the task
• The first available slot for “everyone who needs to be there” is a week or a fortnight away, so the task moves at the speed of the calendar, not the speed of the work
• Someone’s real job has quietly become keeping the group’s shared understanding up to date — merging versions, chasing notes, re-briefing newcomers
• Decisions get reopened because the person who has to act on them was not in the room when they were made
• The instinctive fix for any wobble is to add another person, never to remove one
• People are busy, calendars are full, everyone is in meetings — and the actual deliverable barely moves
• “Let me just check with —” has become the precondition for doing anything at all

Why It Causes Damage

The first and most obvious damage is the sheer waste: weeks of collective attention spent on something that needed an afternoon. That alone would be bad enough. But it is the smallest of the costs, because it is at least visible if anyone ever totals it up.

The larger damage is what it does to speed. A task that moves at the speed of the next slot all seven people can make is a task that has been decoupled from its own urgency. It no longer matters how quickly the work could be done; it matters when the group can next convene, and the group convenes at the pace of the most over-booked calendar in it. So things that are intrinsically fast become slow, not because they are hard, but because they have been wrapped in a coordination layer that sets the tempo. The organisation develops a kind of treacle in which even trivial things take weeks, and nobody can say why, because each individual delay was just a diary clash.

Then there is what it does to ownership, which is more corrosive still. When a task belongs to a group, the felt responsibility for it thins out across the group until nobody carries enough of it to drive it. The meeting becomes the place where the task is discussed rather than the place where it is done, and discussion is comfortable — it has no edges, no moment of commitment, no one on the hook. So the task can be worked on, in the sense of being talked about, indefinitely, without ever being finished, because finishing requires someone to own it and the structure has carefully ensured that no one quite does. A large coordinated group is unusually good at staying busy and unusually bad at being done.

And there is the damage that hides the rest: it looks like diligence. A task with a working group around it looks more serious, more managed, more responsible than the same task left to one person. So the bloated version is not just tolerated; it is admired. Leaders see a packed calendar and a populated channel and conclude that an important thing is being handled with appropriate care, when what they are actually looking at is the friction of too many people consuming the energy that should have gone into the work. The coordination cost disguises itself as conscientiousness, which is precisely why organisations keep choosing more of it.

How To Counter It

The counter is not “have fewer meetings,” which treats the symptom, nor “communicate better,” which usually means more, which makes it worse. The counter is to treat coordination as the expensive thing it is and to spend it as reluctantly as you would spend any other scarce resource.

• Default to the smallest group that can actually do the work, not the largest group that has a stake in it. A stake is not a seat. Most people who “need to be involved” need to be informed of the outcome, which costs almost nothing, not coordinated with throughout, which costs a great deal. Separate the two ruthlessly.
• Give the task to a person, not a group. One named owner who can pull others in as needed will almost always beat a standing group of equals. The owner pays the coordination cost only when the benefit is worth it to them; a group pays it continuously by default. Coordination should be a tool the owner reaches for, not the structure the work lives inside.
• Ask of every addition: what specifically will this person miss, and is that worse than the cost of having them? Force the cost side of the trade onto the same page as the benefit. The benefit is always nameable; make the cost nameable too. Often the honest answer is that the risk they would catch is smaller than the drag they would add.
• Make removing people as routine as adding them. Groups only ever grow because addition is praised and subtraction is awkward. Build the habit of standing people down once their part is done — “thank you, we don’t need you in this any more” should be a normal, friendly sentence, not a slight.
• Be suspicious of the recurring slot. A standing meeting is a standing coordination cost that outlives its reason. If a group needs to meet, let it meet for as long as the task needs and then stop. Permanence is how a temporary coordination cost becomes a permanent tax.
• Watch for the moment the group starts serving itself. When a meaningful share of the effort is going into maintaining the group’s shared picture — the notes, the versions, the re-briefings — rather than into the task, the coordination cost has overtaken the work. That is not a sign to coordinate better. It is a sign the structure is too big for the job and should shrink.

What Good Looks Like

Good looks almost suspiciously quiet. The afternoon’s task is done in an afternoon, by one person, who checked two things with two people by message and shipped it. There was no working group, no channel, no recurring slot, and afterwards there is very little to show for the process — because a healthy process leaves almost no trace of itself, only the finished thing.

It looks like groups that form around real coordination problems and then dissolve the moment the problem is solved, rather than calcifying into standing committees with an interior life. It looks like people being stood down as cheerfully as they were brought in. It looks like a culture where proposing to add someone to a task is met with the same scrutiny as proposing to spend money, because it is spending something — and where proposing to do a thing alone, fast, and finish it is read as competence rather than as cutting corners.

Above all it looks like an organisation that has stopped confusing the meeting about the work with the work. Where a packed calendar is treated as a cost to be explained, not a sign of importance to be admired. Where someone, looking at a task with seven people circling it, is willing to ask the unpopular question — does this really need all of us, or have we built a machine that costs more than the thing it was built to make? The quiet team that ships is not the one that cares least. It is the one that has worked out that past a certain point, every extra hand on the wheel is one more thing the others have to steer around.

A Reflective Question

Think of the last task that grew a group around it. If you added up every hour spent aligning, updating and reconciling, would that total be smaller or larger than the time the task itself actually required — and if you don’t know, why has nobody ever been asked to add it up?