Coherence is something I’ve been paying attention to for a while as a compass direction for effective organizations (and individuals). I’ve used the word alignment, as in getting everybody’s efforts pointed in the same direction.
In his book The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni calls it organizational health, which he defines as integrity: “when it is whole, consistent, and complete, that is, when its management, operations, strategy, and culture fit together and make sense.” He goes on to lay out a playbook for coherence, which is pretty simple: create clarity, overcommunicate clarity, reinforce clarity.
Creating clarity is about strategy, but strategy in the Rumelt sense, picking one threat or opportunity to focus your efforts on, which means not doing everything else you could be doing. I recently saw a Claire Hughes Johnson quote that “Strategy should hurt”, and I think that’s key - if you’re not making painful tradeoffs, you have a wishlist, not a strategy.
Overcommunicate clarity is obvious: repeat, repeat, repeat, so that everybody in the org makes the same tradeoffs without being told, because that’s how you create coherence.
Reinforce clarity is often missed. If your processes and systems don’t reflect the clarity, it’s a misalignment, a lack of clarity. If your strategy is to create great products through teamwork, but your hiring and promotion systems focus on individual performance, people will see the mismatch and respond to the system incentives, not the stated values.
When everything lines up, it creates disproportionate returns, as everything feeds everything else. 1+1+1 doesn’t equal 3, it equals 10. So I think creating coherence is a leadership superpower (and Claire is one of the people I’ve seen do it). But it’s hard to do when fighting fires and in survival mode - only by stepping back (like Gates’s Think Week) can leaders see the big picture and make the hard tradeoffs.