Coherence

Most organisations do not lose coherence through one major decision. It happens gradually, through a succession of choices that each appear reasonable in isolation: a compromise made because circumstances seem to justify it, an exception allowed because it is expedient, or a decision that solves an immediate problem while pulling slightly against something the organisation has said matters. None of these moments necessarily feels consequential, but organisations are shaped by their accumulation.

What people eventually experience as a culture, a brand or even a strategy is therefore not simply what has been written down. It is the pattern created by hundreds of decisions about what gets approved, what receives resources, what gets rewarded, what gets challenged and what is quietly allowed to pass. Over time, those decisions reveal what an organisation actually believes, regardless of what its presentations, principles or strategy documents might say.

This is why I have become increasingly interested in coherence. It is sometimes confused with consistency, but I think there is an important distinction between the two. Consistency tends to ask whether things look or behave alike. Coherence asks whether they belong together.

That difference matters because coherence does not require uniformity. A coherent organisation can contain very different people, products, experiences and ideas; indeed, it probably should. The objective is not to remove difference, but to establish enough clarity about the underlying principles that different answers can emerge without becoming arbitrary.

I have seen this particularly clearly in brands. The strongest brands are rarely those that repeat themselves most faithfully. They are the ones capable of evolving while remaining recognisable. A product can look different from the one that preceded it, an experience can take an entirely new form, and a new generation of people can reinterpret what the organisation stands for, yet the decisions still seem to come from the same place. What connects them is not necessarily a common aesthetic or a rigid set of rules, but a sufficiently clear point of view.

The same principle applies inside organisations. When people understand the thinking behind decisions, they do not need every answer prescribed for them. They can exercise judgement, respond to circumstances and arrive at solutions that may be quite different from one another while still contributing to something that feels whole. In that sense, coherence creates room for autonomy rather than restricting it.

This is also where coherence becomes closely connected to leadership. Leaders shape an organisation not only through the decisions they make themselves, but through the signals those decisions send to everyone else. What receives attention teaches something about what matters. What gets funded, rewarded or promoted does the same, as does what gets challenged and what is allowed to continue. Over time, these signals become more powerful than the principles displayed on a wall because they reveal the principles that actually govern the organisation.

When those signals contradict what the organisation says, people notice. If the strategy speaks about collaboration while incentives reward individual performance, or leadership encourages experimentation while failure carries disproportionate consequences, people quickly learn which message is real. A brand may speak about craftsmanship while decisions increasingly prioritise speed or cost, just as an organisation may ask people to take responsibility while important decisions continue to migrate upwards. Each contradiction may appear manageable on its own, but together they begin to create drift.

The consequence is not simply inconsistency. People start spending energy interpreting the contradictions around them. They have to determine which principles genuinely matter, which rules can safely be ignored and where authority actually sits. The organisation becomes harder to navigate because its stated logic and its operational logic no longer reinforce one another.

Coherence reduces that friction, not by ensuring that everyone knows exactly what to do, but by giving people a clearer basis from which to decide. This distinction matters because I do not believe good organisations can, or should, attempt to engineer every outcome. The environments in which they operate are too complex, and excessive prescription often removes precisely the judgement and adaptability they need.

The alternative is not an absence of structure. It is to create conditions in which many people can make different decisions while those decisions continue to point in a recognisable direction. This is different from alignment understood simply as agreement. Agreement asks people to arrive at the same answer; coherence allows different answers to belong to the same idea.

Perhaps this is also why coherence is often something we experience before we consciously understand it. We encounter a product, speak to someone in an organisation, enter a space or use a service, and somehow the pieces reinforce one another. They have not necessarily been made alike, but there is a relationship between them that makes the whole understandable.

The same is true when coherence begins to disappear. It is rarely the result of a single dramatic departure. More often, the relationship between things weakens incrementally as individual decisions stop reinforcing the principles that once connected them. If coherence can be lost one decision at a time, however, it can also be created in precisely the same way: through decisions that may be different in themselves, but continue to belong together.