Someone Has to Produce the Coordination

Almost every strategy for a difficult problem now contains some version of the same sentence: stakeholders must work together. It is hard to disagree with, which is part of the problem. The interesting question begins after everyone agrees.

Someone has to decide what information the group needs. Someone has to notice that two organisations are doing the same thing while a third task has no owner. Someone has to maintain relationships when priorities change, translate between institutions that use different languages, and keep the work moving after the meeting ends. We usually call this coordination, which makes it sound administrative. I think that description is too weak.

Coordination can be a form of production. The collective-impact literature made this visible by identifying the need for dedicated backbone organisations whose role extends beyond convening into strategy, aligned activity, shared measurement, policy support and resource mobilisation. FSG’s subsequent work showed that these functions change as coalitions mature and that they cannot simply be assumed to happen on their own.

The business literature reached a related conclusion through the study of innovation networks. Dhanaraj and Parkhe described how autonomous firms can create value together without being controlled by one hierarchy, provided the network has ways to move knowledge, maintain stability and coordinate participation.

That matters for climate resilience because many outcomes belong to no single institution. No ministry owns urban heat. The health department sees illness, the labour department sees working conditions, the electricity utility sees peak demand, employers see productivity, and urban planners see the built environment. Communities experience all of them at once.

If nobody holds the whole, each actor can optimise its piece while the overall outcome remains unchanged. But coordination should not be romanticised either. There is no shortage of meetings that produce remarkably little. A coalition can have a logo, a secretariat and quarterly workshops while changing nothing about what its members actually do. Convening can become a substitute for deciding.

The test of coordination cannot therefore be whether people participated. It has to be what became possible because they coordinated. Did information begin moving faster? Did organisations stop duplicating work? Did responsibilities become clearer? Did a shared metric reveal a problem none could see alone? Did a project move because three institutions finally agreed on what each would do?

If not, the coordination may have produced contact without producing capacity.

This distinction matters for philanthropy because coordination is difficult to fund precisely when it is doing something important. A donor can point to a school, a solar installation or a cooling centre. It is harder to point to the months spent building enough trust between institutions for a joint decision to become possible.

That creates a peculiar economic problem. Everyone benefits from good coordination, but no single actor has a strong incentive to pay for all of it. The value is distributed while the cost is concentrated. That is why backbone functions are so often underfunded.

Philanthropy may have a distinctive role here because flexible capital can pay for connective work that governments, firms and project finance often struggle to justify. But philanthropy should demand a harder standard than “we convened.”

The better question is simple: what did the coordination produce?

If we cannot answer that, we probably do not yet understand the function we are funding.

Sources

FSG, Collective Impact.
FSG, Understanding the Value of Backbone Organizations.
Dhanaraj & Parkhe, Orchestrating Innovation Networks.
Systems Orchestration, Coordinating Complex Change.