The sneaky curse of coordination costs
Teamwork makes the dream work, but it's expensive.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, from “The Art of Disappearing”
There is power and impact in working with others. So many things might not get done without collaborative effort. And yet, there’s a hidden expense to distributed work that we often forget to include in our calculus: coordination comes at a cost.
“Coordination costs” include the time, effort, and resources spent getting people to work together effectively toward a common goal. They include things like:
Time spent in meetings and email/text exchanges to align everyone
Effort needed to communicate plans and changes
Resources used to track progress and resolve misunderstandings
Energy spent dealing with delays when one person or team has to wait for another
Productivity maven Cal Newport (2024) calls these coordination costs “overhead tax” and warns that they can sneak up on you.
…when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility.
If you work with a lot of people across multiple projects, coordination costs can consume a growing portion of your daily effort, leaving diminishing energy or attention for doing anything else. Software engineer Fred Brooks (1975) even created a “law” for this counter-intuitive outcome: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
And yet, we often ignore or underestimate coordination costs when planning our projects and managing our teams. Management scholars Chip Heath and Nancy Staudenmayer (2000) describe the “coordination neglect” that arises from poor understanding about collaborative work, writing:
People focus on the division of labor rather than on the equally important process of integration, and when they try to intervene in an ongoing process of coordination, they tend to focus on specialized components of the process rather than attending to the interrelationships as a whole.
Arts nonprofits can be particularly vulnerable to unexpected coordination costs for a range of reasons. Heath and Staudenmayer note that the costs are higher across teams of diverse specialists (a hallmark of complex creative production). Diverse and inclusive management practices can require more coordination, across staff, board, volunteers, and contracted professionals. Passionate and purposeful work can also encourage optimism in planning. And past experience may not predict future effort, since every artistic project and creative team is different.
So, what’s to be done about coordination costs? Newport (2024) suggests we “do fewer things” at once: “Focusing intensely on a small number of tasks, waiting to finish each before bringing on something new, is objectively a much better way to use our brains to produce valuable output.”
When that’s not an option, we can craft our intuitions about project work to get smarter and better at estimating coordination costs. And, we can tighten up our project teams to be as simple and small as possible.
Collaborative work is essential to making art work. But it doesn’t come for free.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Program & Production
Program & Production involves developing, assembling, presenting, and preserving coherent services or experiences.
Framework of the Week: Ladder of Control
The Ladder of Control is a communications tool for supervisors and their direct reports to help calibrate reporting relationship across different kinds of work. The ladder offers seven levels of authority, from the least agency ("Tell me what to do…") to the most agency ("I've been doing…").
Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash
Sources
Brooks, Jr., Frederick P. 1975. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Heath, Chip, and Nancy Staudenmayer. 2000. “Coordination Neglect: How Lay Theories of Organizing Complicate Coordination in Organizations.” Research in Organizational Behavior 22:153–91.
Masten, Scott E., James W. Meehan, and Edward A. Snyder. 1991. “The Costs of Organization.” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 7 (1): 1–25.
Newport, Cal. 2024. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Portfolio.