Coordination Loops

“Engineers are widely seen as people of great technical prowess but who are difficult to get along with, aloof from their customers, and inclined to substitute technologies of personal interest for technologies that would bring value to their customers. This exacts a huge cost – unreliable and undependable technology, waste in technology development, and a standoffish identity for all engineers.

These problems would largely disappear if engineers were educated in value dynamics – the value-generating and value-delivery skills that are the foundation of leadership.

The value skills cannot be learned from a book. They are most effectively learned through coached somatic practice.”

Peter Denning, The Somatic Engineer

As an organization begins to outline its strategic goals and chart a course of action to execute against those goals, its success in delivering the value often depends less on the soundness of the plan than on the energy and health of the organization the “somatic state“, or how it embodies and realizes its ideas. The somatic state is, in my experience, the key element to execution.

A healthy organization is one in which team members can make contracts for which conditions of satisfaction can be met. This is a request and fulfillment process often mediated by project managers. Tasks, definitions, level of efforts, deadlines, etc…are all port of this process. But at a fundamental level this is a human communicative process - a coordination loop, and no amount of methodology, agile, CMMI, lean, six sigma or otherwise will compensate if the core contract making and fulfillment conditions are absent.

Establishing the conditions for effective coordination loops in an organization is the key task of leadership. That includes the development of the skills necessary to participate in effective coordination, skills outside the domain of rational application of applied knowledge.

The below table based in Dr. Denning’s work, but adapted for a business environment outlines some of the components, goals and practices to develop the value delivery skills needed for more effective coordination loops.