About Continuous Coordination

Modern knowledge work is broken. We’ve over-engineered “process tech” — project management, performance management, workflow automation, et cetera — and overlooked the fundamentals that drive real human collaboration. We’re communicating with our tools and systems instead of each other.

And in doing so, we’ve lost the plot for progress, swamped in a dizzying constellation of tools, time zones, tasks, notifications, interruptions, mandates, emails, issues, chats, and back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings. It’s a productivity-killing, morale-sapping burnout machine.

What’s worse is the exasperated tendency to accept this mess as the status quo. “That’s just how it is here at XYZ Co, like everywhere.”

But it’s not like this everywhere. With decades of experience in remote, hybrid, and distributed work, Adam and I have had the good fortune of witnessing and contributing within tech’s highest-performing organizations. Places where it’s invigorating to work. Where managers, contributors, and teams build things in harmony. Where Zoom fatigue is not a thing.

What do these standout orgs have in common? A people-first approach for collaborating and communicating that supersedes time, geography, and team boundaries. Continuous Coordination is the distillation of this approach.

At first, our company set out to build a product called Steady to enable the principles that make up Continuous Coordination. Steady is an alignment layer: it overlays HR, collaboration, communication, and project management stacks to give everyone in an organization the targeted context they need to do great work together.

But along the way, we realized the principles themselves are the main character — a transformational set of ideas that floats all boats. Sure, Steady is a shortcut for implementing them, but they deserve elevation and treatment as a definitive approach to modern work on their own. And they should evolve as work evolves. So with the help of our colleagues, our customers, and industry thought leaders, we wrote it all down and published it under an open-source license.

For more information about redistribution, republishing, remixing and/or contributing to the Continuous Coordination document, please visit the GitHub repository.

Henry Poydar
Adam Stoddard