The Coherence Framework
Where an organisation is coherent with what it says it values, where it’s drifting, and where distortion has set in.
State, story and structure
Coherence is how closely state, story and structure line up, from one person out to the institutions around them. Wholeness is nothing essential abandoned to stay acceptable to a system. Integrity is the movement back towards it.
Every layer has to hold
A system can look healthy at one layer and be failing at another. Most change efforts work on one layer and wonder why nothing shifts.
Inner capacity and regulation
The nervous system capacity of the people inside a system, and especially of those leading it. Without regulation, even well designed structures produce outcomes that contradict their stated values.
Patterns of power and meaning
Where values either live in practice or stay decorative. Whether power is named openly or hidden in plain sight, and whose knowledge gets to count.
Governance and incentives
What an organisation actually rewards, whatever it says it values. Incentives are behaviour architecture, and governance is where values get encoded or quietly dropped.
A fourth part of the framework looks at the boundaries between the layers: how well each one translates into the next, and where the translation breaks down.
Alignment, drift and distortion
Misalignment rarely arrives all at once. Drift is gradual erosion. Distortion is when a specific harm has corrupted the signal. They need different responses.
A system can be coherent and still exploitative. A system with integrity can’t sustain exploitation, because its incentives would contradict its values.
What the framework assumes
Regulation precedes transformation
A dysregulated system can’t hold the conversations that change requires.
Story precedes strategy
A strategy built on a story nobody believes will be quietly worked around.
Meaning precedes mechanism
Tools and processes only work once people know what they’re for.
Place precedes redesign
Change has to start from where a system actually is, not where its plans say it is.
Wisdom tempers growth
Growth that outpaces a system’s capacity is how the people inside it get used up.
Scale amplifies what’s already there
Coherence and incoherence both get bigger as a system grows.
Bring it into your organisation
The framework grew out of my study and my systems leadership practice, and it’s still in development. I’m looking for a small number of purpose-driven organisations to work with as it takes shape.