Regenerative Coordination: Working with Algorithms to Produce Live Services

In an increasingly digital economy, a growing number of organizations are offering live services that deliver updated content and functionality continually during use. Producing live services requires managing ongoing algorithmic updates that occur unpredictably through the cloud from heterogeneous sources that are rarely aligned and prone to disrupt the service. These conditions present new challenges for coordination, which we examined in a 15-month field study of a precision agriculture company that delivers a live service providing analytics on real-time, global crop-imagery. We find that the work of producing this service enacts a regenerative form of coordination that leverages cloud-based, algorithmic updates to produce a consistent and continuous live service. We theorize these findings by explaining how the practices of regenerative coordination enable both ongoing improvements and rapid recovery from unpredictable disruptions, in conditions where the local cues, deliberation processes, and specified ends of traditional coordination are unavailable. Our study advances understanding of coordination in the digital era by articulating how cycles of continual regeneration constitute a dynamic capacity to effectively manage ongoing updates and emergent disruptions generated by cloud-based algorithms.