Coordination and Planning

I saw Clay Shirky on Ted.com discuss the rise of coordination in today’s technological era. For example, now that we all have cel phones, we no longer need intricate plans for finding one another at concerts. Flickr does a great job of coordinating millions of photographs by encouraging people to tag their own pictures. Users then search by tag and have access to the wondrous library of images.

In my line of work one can see the need for both when it comes to controlling the flow of work and managing resources. We spend a lot of time helping people create simple, preferably visual, systems to ask for help and / or control the flow of work through a system. Creating ways to coordinate work is wonderful and important. It is also often limited by the amount of planning done previously. It’s great to maximize the use of resources, it’s not so great when the resources aren’t available, again, to handle the spike of patients leaving the OR at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday.