We built coordination to save the response time. Too often it has become a second job that spends the very time it was meant to protect.
The logic that created our coordination machinery was sound. Many actors arrive in the same crisis, working on the same needs, and without a way to see each other they duplicate in one place and leave a gap in another. So we built the meetings, the working groups, the mapping of who is doing what and where, the shared plans. The intent was a switchboard: a quick way to connect effort to need so the response could move. But a switchboard is only useful while calls pass through it. In too many responses we have turned it into a destination. People now travel to it, sit at it, and report on having attended it, and the connecting it was built to do has quietly become beside the point.
None of this comes from bad faith. The people who run and attend these forums are some of the most committed in the sector, and the structures often began by solving a real problem. This is a system behaving exactly as it was wired to, and a wiring is something we can rebuild.
How the means becomes the end
Watch where the time goes. A field team that should be close to the people it serves spends its week moving between forums, each with its own template, its own update, its own attendance expectation. The map of who is doing what gets filled in carefully, then filed, and rarely changes a single decision about who does what next. We produce a shared plan with real effort, and then each actor goes back to delivering against its own grant anyway, because that is what the money rewards. The coordination happened. The response did not feel it.
The deeper pull is that presence in the room has become its own currency. Showing up signals seriousness to peers and to those who fund the work. Missing a forum can read as not being a team player, even when the hour would have been better spent on the response itself. So attendance rises, the number of forums multiplies, and no one is ever asked what a given meeting changed. We have built a structure that measures how much we coordinate and almost never asks whether the coordination served anyone outside the room.
We measure how much we coordinate. We almost never ask whether it changed anything outside the room.
There is a quieter cost underneath the lost hours. When the forum becomes the place where seriousness is performed, real differences get smoothed over rather than resolved. A shared plan that everyone can sign is often a plan that asked nothing hard of anyone. The mapping shows alignment on paper while the harder questions, who leads, who steps back, who gives up a familiar activity so another can cover it better, stay politely unspoken. Coordination then documents the response instead of shaping it.
Coordination that serves the response
The fix is not to coordinate less. It is to hold every piece of the machinery to a single test: does this connect effort to need faster than its absence would. Coordination that passes is worth defending. Coordination that fails it is a meeting we attend out of habit, and habit is something we can retire.
A few moves make that test real, and most are within reach of the people already in these rooms.
Give every recurring forum a job and a clock. State what decision it exists to make and how often that decision actually comes up. A group that meets weekly to make a monthly decision is a group that can meet monthly. When a forum cannot name the decision it serves, that is the signal to fold it into another or let it close.
Measure coordination by what moved, not by who showed up. Replace the attendance count with a short, honest record of what each forum changed: a duplication caught, a gap covered, a handover agreed. A forum that cannot point to anything it changed over a season is not coordinating. It is convening, and the two are not the same.
Put authority in the room, not only information. Much of our coordination is people sharing updates they have no power to act on, then carrying the real choice back up their own chains. Where we can, send people who can decide, and let the forum settle who leads on what rather than just noting what each actor already planned. A switchboard with no power to connect the call is only a place to wait.
Let the money back the plan. The strongest reason a shared plan changes nothing is that funding still flows to each actor separately, rewarding the single grant over the collective effort. Where we and those who fund the work hold any influence over those terms, we can tie a portion of resources to the joint plan, so that coordinating well is rewarded as plainly as delivering alone is now. Funders share this interest, because a coordinated response wastes less of what they commit.
None of this asks anyone to care less about working together. It asks us to care about the result of working together more than the ritual of it. A switchboard earns its keep by the calls it connects, not by how many people sit at it. So the standard we can set for ourselves is simple. Keep the coordination that moves the response, and have the honesty to close the coordination that has quietly become a place we go instead of the work we came to do.