Some work creates value directly.
Some work exists to coordinate the work that creates value.
As organisations grow, the second category can expand quietly.
People chase updates, rebuild status reports, schedule meetings, remind colleagues, forward information and manually reconcile systems.
None of these tasks looks enormous.
Together, they can consume a significant part of the organisation.
Coordination is a tax
A hand-off requires information.
If the information does not travel automatically, someone has to move it.
A deadline requires visibility.
If the system does not provide that visibility, someone has to ask.
An approval requires evidence.
If the evidence is scattered across email, documents and chat, someone has to collect it.
This is the coordination tax.
It is paid in small pieces of attention throughout the day.
The cost is larger than the minutes
Manual coordination does not only consume time.
It fragments attention.
A five-minute interruption can break concentration for much longer than five minutes.
When people repeatedly switch between their actual work and coordination tasks, the organisation loses depth.
This is especially expensive for people whose value depends on judgement, creativity or complex problem solving.
Status should be a property of the system
Many organisations create meetings because the system cannot answer basic questions.
What is happening?
Who owns it?
What is blocked?
What changed?
What needs a decision?
If the workflow itself records these things, status becomes available without requiring a meeting to reconstruct it.
That does not eliminate communication.
It makes communication more useful.
Automate the movement, not the judgement
A lot of coordination is moving information between places.
That is an excellent automation target.
Create the record. Notify the right person. Update the status. Attach the evidence. Schedule the follow-up.
These are useful system behaviours because they do not normally require deep judgement.
The person can then spend time on the decision itself.
Watch for coordination roles
Sometimes organisations create roles primarily to compensate for fragmented systems.
Project coordinators, operations assistants and managers can add enormous value.
But leadership should ask how much of their work exists because information does not move cleanly.
The answer may reveal a larger opportunity than simply hiring another coordinator.
Reduce the need to chase
One of my favourite indicators of operational quality is how often people have to chase.
Chasing an update. Chasing an approval. Chasing a document. Chasing a response.
Every chase is evidence that the system expected a human to remember.
Some chasing will always exist.
But repeated chasing is design feedback.
Better coordination feels quieter
A well-designed organisation is not silent.
It simply creates less unnecessary noise.
Information arrives where it is needed. Exceptions are visible. Routine follow-up happens automatically. People know what they own.
The result is not only lower administrative effort.
It is more usable attention.
And attention is one of the organisation's most valuable resources.