For companies · Friction & coordination waste
The friction is not in your people. It is between them.
Smart people, sound strategy, enough resources. And still, what should take a week takes a month, decisions get made twice, and the handoff between two teams is where the customer waits. You can feel it. You cannot find it on any report. It has a name: coordination waste.
A person reads every note and writes back. No deck, no demo.
What you have been told it is
Three explanations, and each one keeps you where you are.
Process
So you bought the tool and wrote the playbook, and the same breakdowns now have better documentation.
People
A few of them are not team players, so you reorganized, and the same conversations produced the same results in a new arrangement.
Alignment
So you held the offsite, and ninety days later nothing had changed, because alignment was never the problem. Promises were.
What it actually is
Your company runs on conversations. Thousands of them a day.
Someone asks for something, someone promises it, someone does it, and someone says whether it was done. Four acts, in a loop: a request, a promise, a report of completion, and a declaration of satisfaction. When those moves are clean, coordination is nearly automatic. When they are muddy, everything becomes friction.
Friction is what it feels like from the inside. From the outside it has a name: coordination waste. Chauncey Bell, who spent decades inside enterprises finding it, defined waste as “an assessment we make that resources and capacities are being expended in ways that are not contributing,” and found that the waste in how people coordinate is usually larger than the waste in the work itself. It is the rework, the duplicated effort, the commitment that fell through the cracks because everyone assumed someone else had it, the meeting that multiplied while the decision did not.
“The coordination costs are frequently higher than any of the costs of the physical components or the labor involved.”
Chauncey Bell, Identifying and Assessing the Economic Consequences of Coordination Waste. Quoted with his permission.
Where it hides
Four places in the loop, and two underneath it.
The request nobody makes
People reluctant to make requests of each other, so the need travels as a hint, a hope or a complaint. The work starts late, or starts wrong, or never starts.
The promise nobody meant
Coordination built on shallow or insincere promises. A yes that meant maybe, with no date and no way to withdraw it, discovered at the deadline.
The delivery that misses
On-time delivery of a quality result at the agreed cost is where it begins. Every lapse here is paid for twice: once in the rework, and once in the trust.
The satisfaction nobody declares
Nobody says it is done, or says what was wrong, so it is never quite finished and never quite closed. Bell calls the systematic failure to declare satisfaction a pathological condition. It is the most common one we find.
The tax of mistrust
Extra supervision, complexity in coordinations, structures built to offset the mistrust. His words: “expensive mechanisms are installed which are difficult or impossible to remove.”
The silence
What he calls communicative incompetence: the inability to decline a request, so it is accepted and quietly not done. Assertions confused with assessments. The chronic failure to listen.
And the rest of his list
Repetition, shadow organizations, and work that has become mere toil.
The list goes on: repetition, redundant supervision and redundant roles, the shadow organizations that grow up around a structure nobody trusts, obsolete actions, actions that produce the opposite of their intent, information that arrives too late to act on, the failure to innovate, and work that has become mere toil. “When we are unable to innovate,” he writes, “we are already dead and often not aware of it.”
Most people never see any of it as waste, because they see it as people. In his words, “most often, people interpret their situations in terms of personal activities and blame.” That produces arguments, bickering and more waste. Seen as a loop with a missing act, the same situation produces a request.
What it is already costing you
Ask the company to list its top ten promises. Then count how many were kept on time.
In the best companies in the world the answer is about six. In most it is about three. The other seven are being paid for every week, in rework, in late nights, in the customer who stopped calling, and in the person who stopped trying.
None of it shows up as a line item. All of it comes out of the company. “Modern accounting systems ‘have eyes only for’ things for which we can account costs and revenues,” Bell writes, and events of coordination waste are for the most part not recorded in them. Inventories were an asset in every accounting tradition until Toyota taught the world to see them as waste. Coordination waste is waiting for the same turn, and it is larger.
of people are emotionally detached at work. Gallup, State of the Global Workplace.
lost each year to disengagement, nearly 9% of global GDP.
gain in a leadership team’s capacity to handle breakdowns, in twelve weeks, at a half-billion-dollar franchise.
You can see your own company’s friction in one conversation.
A call with us. No pitch, no deck, no diagnosis.
Where companies are when they arrive
Nobody arrives in general. Find the one that stings.
Who this is for
Companies where the talent is real, and the company is working and not compounding.
CEOs, COOs, and heads of business units in companies between a few million and a few hundred million. The reason is in the room, not in the market.
And who it is not for. Anyone who wants the friction removed without changing how they themselves ask, promise, and decide. Anyone looking for a tool to install on top of the same conversations. Anyone who wants it handled quietly by someone else; the conversations that matter here are yours.
What the work is
Five things, in order.
Every person gets a private seat
COROS works with each person on the real situation in front of them: the request they have not made, the promise they are about to miss, the breakdown they have been routing around. Nothing is asked of the company until value has reached its people.
We interview before we propose
A short series of interviews across levels, in the form of care rather than audit: what people are responsible for, what is not working for them, how they cope, what they would ask for if asking were safe. What comes back is a map of the work as requests and promises, so people see the missing act instead of the person to blame.
The company declares what it is up to
Friction is what you feel. Mobilization is what you want. A company that has said plainly what it is up to can ask its people for promises toward it, and that is the moment friction turns into motion.
New conversations are installed, in the work itself
Requests with conditions and dates. Promises tracked and renegotiated early, never allowed to fail in silence. Breakdowns named and repaired in the open. Satisfaction declared, so things actually close. Leaders go first.
COROS stays
After the practice is installed, COROS keeps it alive every day, in the moment a request is made, a promise wavers, or a mood needs naming. It holds the company’s state of action, promises, moods and breakdowns, for the whole company and never for a name. And if you want it, we build the company’s own AI on the same engine.
Never a window into any individual
Every person keeps a private, confidential coach.
Two memories. Yours holds your conversations, and it is yours alone. Your company’s holds only what is shared between people: the concerns, the conversations, the commitments. Never a personal detail.
Nothing anyone says is visible up or down the chain; the organization sees only the whole, never a transcript, never a name. People tell it the truth precisely because you cannot read it, and the truth is the only thing here worth having.
“Curiously, and in apparent contradiction to the laws of physics, reductions in the cost of coordination simultaneously eliminate various kinds of waste.”
Chauncey Bell. Cycle times fall and quality rises at the same time, because the same few breakdowns were producing all of it.
What changes
Loops close. The waste becomes visible. The mood turns.
Loops close
Requests get a yes, a no, or a counter-offer. Promises get completed or renegotiated, not forgotten. Satisfaction gets declared, so the work is finished and not merely stopped.
The waste becomes visible
Not as a number in a dashboard, but as a Tuesday that used to take until Friday, and a structure of extra checks that quietly comes down.
The mood turns
Trust shows up as bold promises again, and ambition replaces the realism that was resignation in a suit.
One request, repaired
What it sounds like in practice.
A head of operations
I need the forecast cleaned up before the board meeting Thursday.
COROS
Who are you asking, and what would clean mean to them? Right now this is a wish with a date on it.
A head of operations
Priya. The regional numbers reconciled, and the two scenarios the board asked for last time.
COROS
Can she promise that by Wednesday noon, so you have a day? And does she know she can say no, or ask for Thursday morning?
A head of operations
I will ask her for Wednesday noon and tell her to push back if it is not possible.
COROS
Good. I will check in with you Wednesday at noon. If it has slipped, that is the moment to talk, not Thursday.
A composite exchange, shortened. A person’s conversations with COROS are theirs; this one is illustrative.
In their words
“They helped move my team beyond conflict into trust, candor, and accountability,
and we’re now navigating a major shift in our company without a serious hiccup.”
“Eight months later, the mood in my team is grounded optimism and ambition.”
Fair questions
The questions that come up in the first call.
Is coordination waste a real thing, or a metaphor?
A real thing, with a name and a method, from Chauncey Bell, who spent decades measuring it inside enterprises. It is as real as inventory waste was before Toyota taught the world to see it, and about as invisible until someone points.
Why do our systems not show it?
Because they record tasks and dates, and the waste lives between them: in the request that was never made and the satisfaction that was never declared. In Bell’s words, modern accounting systems have eyes only for things for which we can account costs and revenues.
Is this a productivity tool?
No. Productivity tools assume people already know how to ask and promise. This works one level down, where those tools get their input.
Will people actually use it?
They use it for their own situation, not yours, which is why they come back. Nobody is enrolled in anything; each person starts alone, privately, with something real.
How will I know it is working?
We measure in units you already trust: the surveys your organization already runs, the promises kept this quarter against last, and the challenges your people bring to COROS and resolve.
Is this change management?
Change management manages the change. This changes the conversations the company runs on, so the next change has something to run on.
The terms
Every price in the open, and nothing priced before we have told you what we found.
Free to start for every person, as themselves. Company plans are priced per seat and start at $2,500 a month, with every price on the pricing page, where you can build your own plan in a minute. Human mentors are there by the session when a person needs a person. The interviews come first, and everything is priced after we have told you what we found.
If you want the company’s own AI built on the same engine, that is AI Engineering Services, scoped once we know your company.
What it rests on
The name coordination waste belongs to Chauncey Bell, who spent decades inside enterprises identifying and measuring it. His paper on its economic consequences is here, and it is quoted on this page with his permission; our short definition is here. The four acts of work, the request, the promise, the report of completion and the declaration of satisfaction, are the loop of action he and Fernando Flores described, and the oldest idea COROS is built on. The lineage is here.
The company that moves again: the friction was never in your people, it was in the conversations between them, and those can be redesigned in weeks.
An hour, one on one. You tell us what your company is up to and where it is stuck. We listen, and then we come back with what COROS could do, in plain terms, and what it would cost. If the honest answer is nothing, we say so.
Book a call with us →Would rather we came to you? Ask us to get in touch, with a line about your situation. A person reads every note, and writes back.