Coping Propagation: How Coordinated Action Persists Without Deliberative Alignment

How does coordinated action persist when interdependence unfolds faster than deliberation can organize it? Existing research explains coordination through routines, shared cognition, communication, high reliability practices, or deliberate adaptation. These perspectives clarify how coordination is structured and stabilized, but they leave under-specified a narrower episode-level problem: how one actor’s action becomes immediately usable for others when there is no time to establish full alignment. This paper develops a bounded conceptual mechanism—coping propagation—to address that problem. Under temporal compression and dense interdependence, local responses become action conditions for adjacent actors. Coordination continues not because actors converge on a shared representation or select optimal actions, but because successive responses remain mutually processable.