Movement Intelligence Framework
COORDINATION
The art of flexible adaptability
What If You're Only Solving One Part of the Problem?
To function effectively, all the parts that make us up must work together in a highly specialised way. Much of this coordination is managed by the autonomic nervous system, which regulates heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, digestion, fight-or-flight responses, and elimination.
Our muscular activity is coordinated through the somatic nervous system, often referred to as the voluntary nervous system.
Human coordination is the adaptive organisation of the whole person.
Physical and psychological processes work together in synchrony, in the right sequence and at the right time, to produce an appropriate response to present conditions.
Alexander observed that when this integrated system of coordination is disrupted, a wide range of functional problems can arise.
When people experience such difficulties, they commonly seek interventions aimed directly at relieving symptoms or correcting the particular function that appears to be at fault. What is often less obvious is that the problem may not originate in the affected activity, structure, or function itself. Instead, it may reflect a more general interference in the person’s overall pattern of coordination.
From Alexander’s perspective, lasting improvement often depends not on doing more to the symptomatic part, but on reducing the interference that is disrupting the organisation of the whole system.
If you have been trying to overcome neck pain by working exclusively on your neck, or back pain by treating only your back, you may be addressing just one part of a much larger pattern. The symptom may be local, but the conditions that contribute to it may involve the coordination of the whole person.
Different Ways of Understanding Coordination
A convergence of ideas
Although these theories emerged from different fields and were developed by different researchers, they arrive at remarkably similar conclusions. Each suggests that coordination is not produced by isolated parts acting independently. Instead, effective movement emerges from the relationships between the whole person, the task being performed, and the environment in which it occurs.
There is something reassuring about this convergence. When different lines of inquiry point towards the same underlying principles, confidence in those principles naturally increases.
For those exploring Movement Intelligence or the Alexander Technique, this provides an important foundation. The systemic approach used in this work is not based on a single theory or tradition. It is supported by multiple perspectives that recognise coordination as a whole-person process rather than a collection of separate mechanical events.
While the language may differ, the message is consistent: human movement works best when you engage with the entire system rather than focusing on isolated parts.
This gives you good reason to approach movement, learning and performance through a systemic lens, and confidence that this approach is grounded in a broader understanding of how coordination actually works.
Â
The Movement Intelligence Framework
Coordination is the first of five interconnected domains within the Movement Intelligence Framework.
Together, Coordination, Movement Habits, Balance and Support, Attention and Awareness, and Learning Through Movement provide a practical way of understanding how people organise themselves, adapt to change and continue to learn throughout life.
Rather than focusing solely on symptoms or isolated parts, the framework explores the relationships that influence how the whole system functions.
Coordination reveals how the system is working together. Habits reveal the patterns that shape it. Balance and Support reveal the conditions that sustain it. Attention and Awareness reveal what can be perceived and changed. Learning Through Movement provides the process through which new possibilities emerge.
Underlying this framework are three complementary influences: the Alexander Technique, Systems Thinking and Tensegrity. Together they support a simple but powerful idea:
Human movement works best when we work with the whole system rather than trying to manage isolated parts.
The remaining domains of the Movement Intelligence Framework explore these ideas in greater depth.
