Coordination Waste
The invisible, costly waste that piles up when people can’t listen for what matters, speak to each other, or recover from broken promises, the source of most failed projects, useless meetings, and quiet disillusionment.
Invented by Chauncey Bell ↗
Every organization tracks the cost of materials, labor, and time. Almost none can see its largest cost: the resources burned when people fail to coordinate, the rework, the duplicated effort, the stalled decisions, the projects that quietly die in the gap between a request and a kept promise.
Chauncey Bell named this “coordination waste.” It accumulates wherever requests are vague, promises are hollow, listening is poor, and trust has eroded into extra supervision and defensive complexity. It’s invisible to conventional accounting precisely because it lives in conversations, not on balance sheets, yet Bell argues these costs frequently exceed the cost of the physical work itself.
Its mirror image is the opportunity: because coordination waste comes from breakdowns in language and trust, reducing it cuts cost, shortens timelines, and raises quality all at once, it removes root causes instead of treating symptoms. This is precisely the waste COROS is built to find and recover.
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