---
title: "CHORUS | The Multi-Agent Organization"
description: "CHORUS is a six-skill coordination protocol for teams of 2 to 15 people who share work with specialised AI workers: Charter, Handoff, Orchestrate, Review…"
image: "https://lenvanderhof.com/photos/len-portrait-1.jpg"
---

Framework

# CHORUS The Multi-Agent Organization

CHORUS is a six-skill coordination protocol for teams of 2 to 15 people who share work with specialised AI workers: Charter, Handoff, Orchestrate, Review, Update, Sync. Org charts name reporting lines. CHORUS names coordination lines.

The moves

6

## When to use it

Use CHORUS when adding agents made the team slower: lost handoffs, unreviewed model output, standups that could have been a dashboard. Protocol outlives tools.

## The moves

1. 01

### Charter

Seven fields that turn a vague intention into a contract any worker, human or agent, can be handed.
2. 02

### Handoff

A context packet with six fields that carries a task across a boundary so the receiver never guesses.
3. 03

### Orchestrate

Serial steps, fan-out to parallel agents, fan-in to a merge, and a named escalation to a human.
4. 04

### Review

A gate where output passes only when it meets acceptance criteria, instead of being vibe-checked.
5. 05

### Update

Review findings flow back into prompts, tools, SOPs, and charters, so the system improves run over run.
6. 06

### Sync

One surface showing who owns what and what is blocked, read in a short weekly ritual.

## The book

Available now

### The Multi-Agent Organization

How Humans and AI Agents Share Work Without Losing the Plot

Open the bookThe articleThe series

## Related frameworks

STACK

### The Agentic Codebase

STACK is a five-layer architecture for repositories where humans and agents share work: Structure, Toolchain, Agent configuration, Connection, Knowledge and quality. The agent OS is versioned like the app.

SENSE

### AI Agents for Startup Strategy

SENSE is a five-move strategic intelligence layer: Scan, Evaluate, Navigate, Simulate, Execute. It turns agent work from a productivity shortcut into a sourced claim that changes a watchlist, an assumption register, or a Monday decision.

GRAIN

### The RAG Engineer

GRAIN is a retrieval loop: Gather, Rank, Assemble, Inspect, Navigate. Gather governs the corpus: sources, permissions, and versioning. Rank retrieves candidate passages and reranks them for the question actually asked. Assemble builds the context the model may see. Inspect traces a wrong answer back to the chunk and retrieval decision behind it. Navigate keeps the index fresh: TTL policy, re-ingest, and change detection. If you cannot point at the passage, you do not have retrieval. You have a fluent guess.

## Essays on this site

- [What is an AI agent?](https://lenvanderhof.com/en/blog/what-is-an-ai-agent/)
- [The Multi-Agent Organization: introduction](https://lenvanderhof.com/en/blog/the-multi-agent-organization-introduction/)
- [Why multi-agent systems fail](https://lenvanderhof.com/en/blog/why-multi-agent-systems-fail/)
- [An agentic workflow is not an automation](https://lenvanderhof.com/en/blog/agentic-workflow-vs-automation/)
- [What is CHORUS? Coordination, not a choir](https://lenvanderhof.com/en/blog/what-is-chorus/)

## Terminology

- [CHORUS](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/chorus/)
- [STACK](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/stack/)
- [SENSE](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/sense/)
- [GRAIN](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/grain/)
- [AI agent](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/ai-agent/)
- [Human in the loop](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/human-in-the-loop/)
- [Override doctrine](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/override-doctrine/)

CHORUS here is the coordination protocol from The Multi-Agent Organization: Charter, Handoff, Orchestrate, Review, Update, Sync, for human teams of 2 to 15 with specialised AI workers. It is not Chorus AIDLC, not chorusprotocol.dev, not a choir, not CrewAI, and not a graph of model calls. ROSTER is the company-of-one counterpart.

## Citation

CHORUS (The Multi-Agent Organization). Len P. van der Hof, Systems for the Strategic Self. https://lenvanderhof.com/frameworks/chorus/

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