Coordination rarely appears in the plan, yet it determines whether the plan survives contact with a team. Someone notices the unanswered question, remembers the prior decision, connects two conversations, or checks that the handoff actually landed.
Intelligence in the handoffs
Minsky’s society of mind replaces one central intelligence with many smaller processes whose interaction produces capable behavior. Organizations work similarly. Their intelligence is distributed across people, documents, rituals, and informal memory.
The failure mode is not always that any one part is weak. It is that information does not arrive where it can change an action. A decision sits in one channel while the work proceeds in another.
Making the background visible
Agents are well suited to some of this background work: tracing dependencies, surfacing stale commitments, summarizing shifts, and finding the person or artifact that can unblock the next move.
The design challenge is to do this without creating another stream that people must manage. Useful coordination should feel like continuity, not supervision.