The Coordination Stack: The Five Questions Every Work System Must Answer
- Brandon Hatton
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
Most work breakdowns don’t happen because people aren’t working hard enough.They happen because coordination breaks down.
Deadlines are missed.Responsibilities are unclear. Work gets duplicated, delayed, or dropped altogether.
At the Work Management Institute, we study coordination not as behavior, but as infrastructure. From that work emerged the Coordination Stack™ — a foundational framework that explains how work is coordinated at a system level.
Coordination Isn’t About Effort — It’s About Answers
After studying thousands of real-world work scenarios, one pattern shows up again and again:
When coordination fails, it’s because one or more basic questions were never clearly answered.
Those questions are universal. They apply whether the work involves:
One person or many
A small team or a global organization
Humans, AI agents, or hybrid systems
The Coordination Stack organizes those questions into a simple, durable model.
The Coordination Stack™ at a Glance
The Coordination Stack defines five essential coordination questions that must be answered for work to flow reliably:
Why — Why does this work exist?
What — What exactly needs to be done?
Who — Who is responsible?
When — When does it happen?
How — How is the work carried out and aligned?
These are not steps or phases.They are layers.
Higher layers depend on lower ones being clear. When a higher layer breaks, the root cause is often lower in the stack.
The Five Layers Explained
1. Why — Purpose & Intent
Every piece of work exists for a reason. The Why layer defines the outcome the work is meant to achieve and the intent behind it.
When Why is unclear, teams may execute efficiently — but toward the wrong goal.
Clear Why answers questions like:
What outcome are we trying to achieve?
How will we know this was successful?
Why does this matter now?
2. What — Work Definition & Scope
The What layer translates intent into concrete work.
It defines what needs to be done, what is in or out of scope, and what “done” actually means.
When What is unclear, teams experience:
Rework
Scope creep
Misalignment about expectations
Clear What creates shared understanding.
3. Who — Ownership & Responsibility
Coordination requires accountability.
The Who layer establishes ownership by answering:
Who owns this work?
Who contributes?
Who decides?
When Who is unclear, responsibility diffuses and work stalls.When it is clear, progress accelerates.
4. When — Timing & Dependencies
Work does not exist in isolation.
The When layer defines timing, order, and dependencies:
By when does this need to be done?
What depends on what?
In what sequence does work happen?
When When is unclear, teams experience delays, thrash, and missed commitments — even when everyone is capable and motivated.
5. How — Execution & Alignment
The How layer defines how work is carried out day to day.
This includes:
How people communicate
Where updates and decisions live
How coordination happens in practice
When How is unclear, teams compensate with excess meetings, messages, and manual follow-ups.
What the Coordination Stack Is (and Isn’t)
The Coordination Stack is not:
A methodology
A maturity model
A productivity system
A tool recommendation
It is a diagnostic and design framework.
It helps leaders, teams, and organizations:
Identify where coordination is breaking down
Design more resilient work systems
Evaluate tools and processes more effectively
Coordination as Infrastructure
Most organizations treat coordination as something people should “just do better.”
The Coordination Stack reframes coordination as infrastructure — something that must be deliberately designed and maintained.
Tools, processes, and governance mechanisms exist to support the stack — but they are not the stack itself.
Why This Matters Now
As work becomes:
More distributed
More asynchronous
More AI-assisted
The cost of poor coordination increases.
Frameworks like the Coordination Stack help organizations move beyond tool-centric thinking toward system-level clarity about how work actually flows.
Learn More
The Coordination Stack™ is one of several foundational frameworks stewarded by the Work Management Institute as part of the evolving Work Management Body of Knowledge (WMBOK™).