Coordinated Interdependence: How Patterning Governs Flexibility in a Routine Cluster

Adopting a routine dynamics perspective, we use an ethnography of agile project work to explore how emergent and effortful performances of single routines influence dynamics within a cluster of interdependent routines. We find that emergent accomplishments in single routines constrain cluster‐level dynamics, thereby inhibiting flexibility. However, effortful accomplishments in single routines facilitate cluster‐level dynamics, thereby enhancing flexibility. We make three contributions to the literature on routine dynamics and process studies. First, we show how coordinated interdependence based on chaining, orchestrating, and reflecting creates and maintains clusters of routines, and uncoordinated interdependence based on stumbling, irritating, and detaining endangers clusters of routines. Second, we analyse how cluster‐level flexibility results from maintaining a stable pattern across routines, despite pressures to vary routines. Finally, our findings contribute to practice and process studies by analysing interdependence and coordination together as ‘(un)coordinated interdependence’.