Just as looking at what is not the chair helps bring it into relief, pulling focus away from a particular problem (and, instead, looking at the environment around it) can lead to better solutions. When we give notes on Pixar movies and isolate a scene, say, that isn’t working, we have learned that fixing that scene usually requires making changes somewhere else in the film, and that is where our attention should go. Our filmmakers have become skilled at not getting caught up in a problem but instead looking elsewhere in the story for solutions. Likewise at Disney, the conflict between production and the oversight group could have been addressed by insisting that everyone behave better, when in fact, the real solution came from questioning the premise on which the oversight group was formed. It was the setup - the preconceptions that preceded the problem - that needed to be faced.

The Cancer Center suffered from two hallmarks of organizations that are plagued with coordination snafus. First, powerful people ignore, dismiss, denigrate, and even undermine people and groups they need to mesh their work with. Oncologists saw themselves as being at the top of the pecking order at the center and the work of other specialists as secondary, trivial, or downright useless. They dismissed side effects, including fatigue, diarrhea, and cramps, caused by chemotherapy that they prescribed as “normal” and left it to patients to find specialists to treat such problems. Second, powerful people devote little attention to solutions for coordination problems.

As Chip and Nancy put it, for people afflicted with component focus, “wholes are not the ‘sum of their parts,’ they are a function of one part.” The deeper a person’s expertise, the worse this narrow focus gets. Chip and Nancy show how “the curse of knowledge” accentuates the coordination troubles caused by component focus: Experts wrongly assume that—because a subject comes so easily to them after learning about it for years—what they know is obvious and can quickly be grasped by others. Experts unwittingly create coordination snafus by failing to pass along essential information to people in other positions and fields because they assume it is self-evident. Or, when they try to pass information along, experts provide explanations they believe are easy to understand but are incomprehensible to people who aren’t indoctrinated into their circle.

Partition focus, the second mode of coordination neglect, happens when decision-makers devote too much attention to assembling an organization with great parts—and too little attention to how the pieces ought to work together. That’s what happened when Cancer Center leaders fixated on assembling the best specialists in the world and supporting them with excellent staff and technologies—and thought little about linking their work with that of other departments and specialists.

1. Onboard People to the Organization, Not Just the Job

Friction fixers who are intent on building a culture of coordination go beyond training newcomers to perform their narrow job responsibilities. They teach newbies how their work meshes with that of others, how the organization functions, and how to use the system to help them do their work. This saves a lot of trouble down the road....

2. Get Up Close and Personal with People Who Make the System Tick..

Yet, as Wired reported, they developed grudging respect for one another. Together, they patched HealthCare.gov by bringing “order to the site through careful monitoring, automated testing, and a collaborative, methodical, commonsense approach to bug fixing.” There is nothing sacred about L6. Elsewhere, traveling down three or four levels is plenty. The key is locating the people—such as employees, customers, or vendors—who understand how a system works and why it doesn’t...

3. Good Stories Stoke Coordination

Hubert believes the stories that he told strengthened connections between Best Buy employees and customers, and employees and management. Like the one about Jordan, a three-year-old in Florida who loved his T. rex toy and called it his “dino baby.” When dino’s head snapped off, Jordan was heartbroken. Jordan’s mother found the same T. rex at Best Buy, ordered it online, and drove Jordan to a store to pick it up. She told the Best Buy associate that they needed a “dinosaur doctor.” The associate, T, recruited a colleague, Stephanie, and they took Jordan’s headless dinosaur to “surgery” behind the counter out of Jordan’s view. “Just a few more stitches,” the pair said as they replaced the broken T. rex with the new one. When they handed Jordan the “cured” dinosaur, he squealed with joy...

4. Build Roles and Teams Dedicated to Integration...

5. Fix Handoffs...

One rule is “never hand over a fire in the heat of the day.” Firefighters learned this lesson from the Dude Fire in Payson, Arizona, in 1990. Six firefighters were burned to death after a botched handoff, which occurred at “1:00 P.M. on a hot, windy day with temperatures in the high nineties while the fire was making spectacular runs.” Crews now do handoffs at night, when it is easier to see fires and “low winds, high humidity, and cool temperatures stabilize the fire.

Crew chiefs use a briefing for such handoffs to help pass along the “big story,” steps that could by adopted by friction fixers in other settings. During a forest fire, the outgoing chief goes through five steps during a conversation with the incoming chief:

• Here’s what I think we face.

• Here’s what I think we should do.

• Here’s why.

• Here’s what I think we should keep an eye on.

• Now talk to me (i.e., tell me if you (a) don’t understand, (b) cannot do it, (c) see something that I do not).

That last step places responsibility on both chiefs to assure that messages are received and to resolve clashing perceptions...

6. Coordinate on the Fly...

Friction fixers are of two minds. First, they labor to prevent unpleasant surprises. To build workplaces where people aren’t exhausted by one emergency after another and don’t live in fear of system failure. Second, they know, as Beatle John Lennon put it, that “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans...

These teams started with a provisional plan, the “sheet music.” Film crews had a detailed daily schedule. The SWAT team outlined a plan for each mission—which specified, for example, who would cover the exits of a house, where snipers would be stationed, and when officers would bust down the door. But when things didn’t go as expected, because people understood one another’s roles so well and how their roles fit together, teams were adept at revising their plan on the spot....

Role shifting helped them make such rapid adjustments. It happens when a surprise leaves a critical role empty and someone else fills in...

Reorganizing routines is another improvisational practice. It’s triggered when a surprise reveals that the planned sequence or methods aren’t working and something different ought to be done.