THE DIMENSION
Keeping affected people informed when responsibilities or dependencies shift.
The dimension in context
Keeping affected people informed when responsibilities or dependencies shift.
You may help others understand what changes mean for their work.
You may focus on your own adaptation while coordination remains implicit.
An illustrative work situation
A participant changes the order of their work to respond to a new request. The adjustment makes sense locally but delays information another colleague expected that afternoon. Adaptation at one point creates a coordination problem elsewhere. The episode shows why changing a plan includes communicating its dependencies.
A flexible individual response can be unhelpful if others continue acting on the previous agreement. The useful question is whether the participant identified who relied on the plan and which information needed updating. A stable schedule can also be an adaptive choice when other people’s work depends on it.
A small practice to examine
Before making a significant local change, list the people and tasks that rely on the existing sequence. Send a concise update with the revised commitment and any decision needed from them. Afterwards, ask whether the update arrived while they still had options. Use that feedback to improve the next adjustment.
Excessive consultation can delay a decision that already has a clear owner.
A question for closer study
How can research capture the effect of an adaptation on connected work rather than only on the person making it?
Read the example alongside the research
The following editorial passages come from the linked framework chapters. They provide context for the original teaching example above; the example is fictional and is not a reported study finding.
A plan revision can be examined as a sequence of commitments rather than a count of edits. Imagine a publishing schedule with translation, review, and distribution steps. Moving the review date may leave the final deadline unchanged while removing the translator's available work period. A revision ledger would name the triggering fact, the task that changes, the dependent commitments affected, and the people who can authorize the adjustment. It would also identify what remains deliberately stable. This makes it possible to distinguish a carefully bounded update from a document that looks current but contains incompatible promises.
Continue: Revising plans while preserving coordination and continuity →
A handoff includes more than sending information. The recipient needs to recognize the information, understand the expected action, and know what to do when something is missing. Changing a file format, approval step, or timing can disrupt any of those elements. A person may solve their own problem by moving work downstream, creating the appearance of local improvement while increasing effort elsewhere. Reflection should therefore trace one dependency beyond the person’s immediate task.
Continue: Adaptation is social: dependencies, handoffs, and shared meaning →
Work-role research emphasizes that performance can be interdependent, while team-learning research examines conditions that affect whether people raise questions and discuss problems. Together these literatures motivate attention to the social setting of change. MAP does not measure psychological safety or team performance. Its coordination domain asks about a respondent’s reported actions when their adjustment affects another person’s work.
Continue: Adaptation is social: dependencies, handoffs, and shared meaning →
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Pulakos et al. - Adaptability in the workplace: Development of a taxonomy of adaptive performance ↗Griffin, Neal & Parker - A new model of work role performance ↗Edmondson - Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams ↗