why coordination fails
four forces that determine whether collective efforts scale or splinter
I’ve spent a long time thinking about how we can actually solve big problems in a world that’s increasingly noisy and disjointed. About five years ago, I read a paper called Distributed, Not Divided: A Case for Cohesive Activism from Sylvain Labs (a design & strategy out of New York), which helped clarify a question I’d been circling for years: why do some coordination efforts hold together while others fall apart?
After learning of Alain Sylvain’s recent passing, I revisited the paper and was struck by how little has changed in how collective efforts break down, even as the stakes keep rising.
You see it over and over: a crisis hits, people mobilize, and energy spikes. Then, the effort inevitably splinters into different tactics, priorities, and timelines. Coordination turns out to be far more fragile than we like to admit. The efforts that fail aren’t failing because people can’t agree on what to do. They fail because that agreement doesn’t survive real-world friction. When coordination gets messy, distributed, or slow, alignment starts to evaporate.
The difference between movements that scale and movements that collapse comes down to cohesion across four specific domains.
Environment: The places and spaces where people gather
Environment is about understanding the context you’re operating in. Different spaces shape how people show up, what they expect, and how long they stay engaged. When efforts drift across too many environments without intention, messages blur and energy scatters.
Think: Occupy Wall Street tried to coordinate via open assemblies and Twitter simultaneously. The mismatch between spaces (one built for consensus, one built for virality) made shared understanding nearly impossible.
Culture: The ideas, values, and principles that bind people together
Culture helps people act in roughly the same direction even when no one is coordinating them. In loose, distributed efforts, people are constantly making small decisions on their own. Culture gives them a shared sense of what “fits” without needing constant debate or clarification.
Think: In climate activism, people often focus on different approaches — individual lifestyle changes, policy advocacy, or direct action. All are valid, but they don’t always reinforce one another.
Technology: The tools that support the work
Technology should match the people involved and the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. That might mean social media, group chats, shared documents, or email threads. Whatever the tools are, they need to make it easy to see what others are doing, build on it, and stay focused instead of scattered.
Think: Movements relying on Facebook groups where important context gets buried in endless threads that are hard to navigate and build on.
Rhythm: The cadence that makes collaboration possible
Sustaining momentum is hard when attention constantly shifts to the next crisis. Rhythm is about having a shared sense of timing so people know when to engage, when to pause, and when something is building. Without rhythm, people lose track of how their effort connects to what came before.
Think: Sunrise Movement (a big climate advocacy group) has local ‘hubs’ that meet regularly on a set cadence vs. movements that operate in perpetual “emergency mode.”
Most coordination efforts treat one or two domains with intention while leaving the others to chance. They pick the right tools but ignore rhythm. Or, they build strong culture but scatter across incompatible environments. They create regular touch points, but never clarify their shared principles.
The lesson: cohesion can be designed for. When we see coordination starting to fragment, we’d be wise to check these four domains. The breakdown is almost always visible.
Society-scale problems demand society-scale coordination. That coordination won’t emerge by accident.
If not us, who?
j