Contingent Coordination

Traditional Coordination

Traditionally, coordination has been viewed as a managerial role within an organization. Formal leaders are tasked with setting goals for the [Page 160]organization, then ensuring all internal activities are aligned to maximize the potential for efficacy and efficiency. In such instances, coordination is necessary to ensure that all interdependent functions within the organization work in harmony, supportive of the efforts of the collective, with no function being left unaddressed. Within this traditional context, coordination is associated with a number of leadership and management concepts such as the setting of goals, the development of objectives, the allocation of resources, and the establishment of acceptable outcomes.

In a traditional organizational setting, coordination is normally associated with management of that organization. Although some aspects of the organization may be influenced by external factors, including the guidelines of regulatory agencies and market pressures, final decisions related to operational functions are normally developed internally. Although these efforts may be made using a fully authoritarian model, a model that maximizes employee participation, or any permutation in between, there is typically little concern, if any, for aligning operations with the efforts of other organizations, let alone yielding control of operations over to others.

Contingent Coordination

The term contingent coordination may be defined as the ability and willingness of organizations to work outside their normal operational and administrative parameters by partnering with other organizations. This partnership is not necessarily reflected in a full integration of multiple agencies into a virtual organization where decisions are made collectively, but instead is reflected by a number of agencies working together by temporarily yielding their authority to another. In doing so, the agencies essentially subsume their organizational goals to the goals of other organizations, with an understanding that, at some later point, they will become the lead agency, with others supporting them in the attainment of their own organizational goals.

There are a number of challenges to contingent coordination. Appointed officials in public organizations often are constrained by the documents that frame their power and discretion. In some instances, while contingent coordination is not prohibited, it is not recognized as an option within the formal organizational framework, which means utilizing such an approach may differ vastly from the past practices of the organization. In effect, it requires appointed officials to exceed their authority, or at least to temporarily yield it, recognizing that in doing so the organization is deferring achievement of its own mission, which could be construed as negligence. This concern may lead to some hesitancy to engage in such practices, especially if the elected leadership of the locality does not encourage or support innovative and flexible approaches. Therefore, while contingent coordination does provide a potentially valuable means for organizations to work together to solve complex problems, to be effective, the approach must be supported by the elected leadership of the jurisdiction.

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