---
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 collects candidate passages. Rank orders them for the question actually asked. Assemble builds the context the model may see. Inspect checks that the cited chunk is the one used. Navigate decides the next lookup or the refusal. 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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