Coordinate · Facilitate · Empower

Against "coordinate all the things": coordinate what needs coordination, facilitate what needs facilitation, empower what needs empowerment.

The impulse to coordinate everything is generous and wrong. It assumes that the problem is disorder, and that the cure is a central view of who is doing what. What it produces is a middle — someone who must be informed, consulted, and kept current — and a middle is exactly what a body without a centre cannot afford (Centralization Of Power, Subsidiarity, Span of Control).

The correction is to notice that coordinate is one of three verbs, and usually the least appropriate. Coordinate where two efforts genuinely collide and must be sequenced — a shared resource, an interface, a date. Facilitate where people would do the thing themselves if a conversation were held, a room existed, or an introduction were made. Empower where people already know what to do and lack only the standing, the capacity, or the permission they should never have needed (Servant Leadership, Delegation, Capability).

Behind the triad lies an assumption worth stating: that people of good intent are ultimately working on one highest shared project. If that is true, then most apparent disorder is not disorder at all — it is many hands on one thing, seen without the frame that would make it legible. Coordination imposed on that is friction; facilitation and empowerment are what it actually wants (The Meta Project, Meta Game, Stigmergy).

It is load-bearing because it is a test that can be applied in the moment, by anyone, to their own instinct to organise: which of the three is this, honestly? The answer is coordination far less often than it feels (Silos No More, Cross-Functional Integration, Polycentric Implementation of Shared Solutions).

Also called: the three verbs Stands on: Subsidiarity · Servant Leadership · Sovereignty At Every Scale Opens onto: Delegation · Span of Control · Stigmergy · The Meta Project · Meta Game · Centralization Of Power · Polycentric Implementation of Shared Solutions · Capability · Silos No More In play: Home — asked of oneself, before organising anything Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Blogs/the starter kit's Journal/Coordinate, Facilitate, Empower (a 2022 journal post marked by its author as a writing fragment; author's voice preserved) · lionsberg.wiki: Subsidiarity Open: A fragment of a few lines, never developed; nothing states how to tell the three apart in a case where more than one applies, which is most cases.