Work Began Producing Work.
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Primary topic: Coordination work, administrative workload and the growth of secondary work in organisations
Central question: How did organisations of the 2020s create increasing amounts of work whose primary purpose was to coordinate, document, verify or communicate other work?
Key concepts: coordination work, administrative workload, organisational complexity, documentation, meetings, workflow, coordination costs
Core insight: Organisational workload could grow without a corresponding increase in primary work because the activities created to coordinate work increasingly required coordination of their own.
When the Task Was No Longer the Whole Task
Looking back from 2049, one of the more misleading measures of work in the early twenty-first century was the task itself. A project had to be completed, a customer request processed, a decision prepared, a product developed or a problem resolved. Yet performing that primary activity rarely described the complete workload surrounding it.
The work also had to be discussed, allocated, scheduled, documented and reported. Progress had to be made visible. Decisions required approval. Changes had to be communicated. Responsibilities needed clarification. Meetings generated minutes, minutes generated actions and actions generated follow-ups. Digital systems recorded status, while separate communication sometimes became necessary to explain what the recorded status actually meant.
None of these activities was inherently unnecessary. Coordination is indispensable wherever work is distributed between people, teams or systems.
The structural question was different.
What happened when coordinating the work began to create work that itself required coordination?
The Necessary Work Around the Work
Organisations cannot operate solely through primary tasks. Division of labour creates dependencies, and dependencies create coordination requirements. Someone must know what has been completed, what happens next, who is responsible and where a decision is required.
This surrounding activity can be described through the established concept of coordination work. It includes the communication, scheduling, information transfer and alignment required to connect distributed contributions into a functioning whole.
At moderate levels, coordination reduces friction. A short discussion can prevent hours of duplicated work. Documentation can preserve information that would otherwise disappear. A status update can expose a delay before it becomes critical.
The difficulty arises because coordination mechanisms are not organisationally weightless.
Every new mechanism becomes another element that must itself be operated.
A report must be produced.
A meeting must be scheduled.
A dashboard must be updated.
An approval must be obtained.
A project-management system must be maintained.
The organisation has solved one coordination problem by creating another object that now requires attention.
When the Meeting Produced a Workflow
Consider an ordinary coordination meeting. Its purpose is straightforward: several people exchange information and decide what should happen next.
The meeting produces actions. Those actions are recorded. Someone distributes the record. Responsibilities are entered into a project-management system. Progress is checked before the next meeting. If something remains unclear, messages are exchanged. If an action crosses departmental boundaries, another conversation may be required.
The original meeting may have been entirely useful.
Yet its organisational footprint is larger than its duration.
A sixty-minute meeting involving six people is not merely six hours of work. It can generate preparation before the meeting and documentation, communication, tracking and further decisions afterwards.
Again, this does not make the meeting wasteful.
It reveals something more important: coordination has downstream work.
The organisational cost of a coordination mechanism therefore cannot always be understood by observing the mechanism itself.
Recursive Coordination
The later Struction analyses described the more developed form of this phenomenon as recursive coordination: a condition in which mechanisms introduced to coordinate primary work generate additional dependencies that themselves require coordination.
The recursion can begin innocently.
A team needs better visibility, so a weekly report is introduced. Because several reports now exist, management creates a consolidated overview. Maintaining consistency between the reports and the overview requires clarification. A meeting is introduced to discuss discrepancies. Decisions from that meeting need tracking. A dashboard is then developed to improve the tracking.
Every step may solve a real problem.
Yet the sequence has an unusual property.
The organisation is no longer coordinating only its original work.
It is increasingly coordinating its coordination.
This is how workload can grow without any single activity appearing obviously unnecessary.
Why Digitalisation Did Not Automatically Remove It
The digital transformation of the 2020s appeared well suited to reducing this burden. Information could be shared instantly, workflows automated and progress displayed in real time. In principle, better information systems should have reduced the need for manual coordination.
Often they did.
But digitalisation also made additional coordination mechanisms cheaper to create.
Another dashboard could be added. Another notification activated. Another communication channel opened. Another status field introduced. Another automated report distributed.
The marginal cost of producing information fell dramatically.
The cost of receiving, interpreting and acting upon it did not fall at the same rate.
An automated report might require almost no effort to generate while still requiring twenty recipients to decide whether it contained anything relevant to them.
This created an important asymmetry.
Automation could make the production of coordination cheaper without making the consumption of coordination free.
When Visibility Created Obligations
The organisations of the period placed increasing value on transparency. Projects should be visible, responsibilities traceable and progress measurable. These were reasonable objectives, particularly in complex organisations.
Yet visibility has a structural consequence.
Once information becomes available, expectations can form around its use.
A dashboard that can show current progress may create an expectation that it remains current. A communication channel that enables immediate contact may create an expectation of responsiveness. A system that records detailed activities may create an expectation that those activities are recorded consistently.
The technical capability becomes an organisational obligation.
This can be described as visibility maintenance: the work required to keep an organisation’s representations of itself sufficiently current for others to rely upon them.
The organisation does not merely perform work.
It also maintains a representation of the work being performed.
The greater the demand for real-time visibility, the smaller the distance between those two activities can become.
The Second Organisation
From 2049, this produced a striking reconstruction of some workplaces of the 2020s.
Alongside the organisation that performed the work existed a second organisation concerned with representing, coordinating and verifying that work.
The first served customers, developed products, solved problems, delivered services or made decisions.
The second populated systems, prepared updates, reconciled information, scheduled meetings, maintained dashboards, documented actions and demonstrated progress.
These were not separate institutions. The same people often inhabited both.
The distinction is analytical rather than literal, but it reveals why employees could feel extraordinarily busy even when the volume of their identifiable primary tasks had not increased proportionately.
Part of their capacity was being consumed by maintaining the organisational infrastructure through which everyone else could understand what they were doing.
Why Every Activity Could Still Look Reasonable
Recursive coordination was difficult to detect because examining individual activities rarely exposed the problem.
Why does this report exist?
Because management needs visibility.
Why does the meeting exist?
Because several teams depend on one another.
Why is the status field required?
Because delays need to be identified.
Why are the actions documented?
Because responsibilities must remain clear.
Each answer can be convincing.
The structural issue appears only when the activities are considered as a system.
A report feeds a meeting. The meeting creates actions. The actions enter a tracking system. The tracking system generates notifications. The notifications produce questions. The questions create conversations. The conversations modify the work, which changes the report.
No individual component has to be pointless for the total coordination architecture to become expensive.
This is a central Struction distinction.
Local usefulness does not guarantee structural economy.
When Coordination Density Became the Better Measure
The later reconstruction therefore shifted attention from the number of coordination activities to their coordination density.
Coordination density describes how many additional interactions, updates, handovers or representations are required around a unit of primary work.
Two organisations can perform essentially the same task while imposing very different coordination requirements upon it.
In one, responsibility is clear, information moves directly and a decision closes the issue. In another, the same task appears in several systems, crosses multiple handovers, requires repeated status communication and remains visible to several stakeholders after the operational work has been completed.
The primary task is identical.
Its organisational shadow is not.
This distinction helped explain why attempts to improve productivity by making individuals work faster often produced disappointing results. The constraint was not necessarily the speed of primary work.
It was the amount of secondary work attached to it.
The Productivity Question the Period Often Missed
Productivity discussions of the 2020s frequently focused on tools, individual efficiency, automation and time management. These approaches could produce meaningful gains.
But they could also address the wrong layer.
Saving ten minutes in performing a task mattered little if the task subsequently generated thirty minutes of reporting, clarification and follow-up. Automating one activity might create limited benefit if several coordination requirements remained attached to its output.
The more revealing productivity question therefore became:
How much additional organisational activity does this piece of work create before it can be considered closed?
This moved analysis away from execution speed and towards structural consequence.
A task that takes longer to perform but closes cleanly can impose less total organisational load than a faster task that continues to generate questions, updates and handovers afterwards.
Sequence mattered.
Handover mattered.
Closure mattered.
The unit of analysis could no longer be the task alone.
What the Organisations of the 2020s Had Misread
From the perspective of 2049, the misreading was not that organisations coordinated too much. Complex work genuinely requires coordination, and eliminating it indiscriminately would simply replace visible coordination with errors, duplication and confusion.
The problem was that coordination was often treated as an overhead attached to work rather than as a system capable of generating its own workload.
Once that distinction became visible, apparently minor additions looked different.
Another report was not merely another report.
It was a new recurring obligation, a new information source and potentially a new dependency.
Another meeting was not merely another hour.
It could become an entry point into a sequence of preparation, documentation and follow-up.
Another dashboard was not merely better visibility.
It could establish a new representation that now had to remain aligned with reality.
Every coordination mechanism had a structural wake.
The 2020s had become very good at seeing the mechanism.
They were less consistent at measuring what followed behind it.
Closing Reconstruction
From 2049, some of the busiest organisations of the early twenty-first century therefore appeared differently. Their workload had not grown solely because they were doing more primary work.
Work had acquired increasingly elaborate organisational surroundings.
People coordinated activities, documented the coordination, communicated the documentation, tracked the resulting commitments and maintained systems designed to make all of this visible.
Each layer could be justified by the layer beneath it.
That was precisely why the architecture could grow.
The decisive question was no longer simply whether a coordination activity was useful.
It was whether the work it prevented exceeded the work it created.
They thought they were organising the work. They noticed later that organising the work had become a growing category of work itself.
Summary
From the perspective of 2049, organisational workload in the 2020s could not always be explained by the volume of primary work. Around that work grew a second layer of meetings, status updates, documentation, approvals, follow-ups and coordination. Each activity could be individually justified, yet together they created additional dependencies that themselves required management. Struction reconstructs this as recursive coordination: coordination that generates further coordination because every additional mechanism introduces new information, handovers and obligations that must themselves be maintained.
Transparency
This article was developed within the framework of the concept The Second Thinking Space with the support of generative artificial intelligence. AI is used to explore questions, broaden perspectives, generate alternative formulations, identify patterns and facilitate the critical examination of ideas and assumptions. The article has been substantively reviewed, editorially revised and approved by the author. All editorial decisions, evaluations, interpretations and conclusions are the sole responsibility of the author.
