Super sharp distinction here. The bit about how alignment evaporates under pressure while coherence endures really nails something I've seen in crossfunctional teams. Everyone agrees in the kickoff meeting, but then when actual tradeoffs come up, people default to their local incentives rather than the shared vision. Coherence is basically asking whether the org's operating system is actually configured to support what leadership says it wants, not just whether people nod along in meetings.
Thanks for sharing your observation - everyone is aligned until their annual performance rating and bonus (if those are still paid these days) is at risk. Did you ever come across an example where defaulting to local incentives was set aside for the greater good of the project?
Okay, it just seems like you're asking the concept of coherence to do the kind of heavy lifting that I think can otherwise be done with a properly designed and executed mission statement. When you talk about objectives and routines etc, that sounds to me like analyzing whether the mission statement is being ideally executed. It's possible we are just be dancing around semantics. I was a government fraud investigator so I see things from the perspective of how bad performance can be avoided using the existing tools in place. I always enjoy reading your posts.
I don’t think this is a question of semantics, and I don’t see coherence as doing work that a well-crafted mission statement can otherwise perform.
From an internal audit (I am a CIA and CRMA) and governance perspective, mission statements are important signalling tools, but they are not operative mechanisms. In practice, they rarely govern how trade-offs are resolved, how timing decisions are made, or how priorities are recalibrated when conditions change. Assessing whether a mission statement is being “properly executed” assumes that the mission itself is sufficient to guide behaviour under uncertainty. My experience has been that it is not.
When I refer to coherence, I am pointing to a system-level property: whether objectives, decision rights, incentives, routines, and information flows reinforce one another over time, especially under pressure. Organizations often comply with their stated mission while still behaving incoherently at the operational and strategic level. That gap is observable, auditable, and material.
So the distinction I’m drawing is not linguistic. It is about the limits of static governance artifacts versus the need to understand and govern how the system actually behaves. Mission statements express intent; coherence determines whether that intent survives contact with reality.
Maybe this is a conversation about the quality of leadership. For my perspective, a strong leader with a vision can use a mission statement to do anything. There is value in theory and then there's the real world of exactly what do you do next. What you're calling an artifact, I'm calling a pressure point. Understanding how a system actually behaves in the context of overt dysfunction doesn't require special theory.
If all you're using the mission statement to do is express intent, then you're underutilizing the mission statement. I guess what I'm pushing for is the concept of the mission statement itself, a holistic model that incorporates every facet of the objective, including human nature. If any aspect of the mission statement is unrealized, that requires analysis and action including figuring out who, what, how, where and when.
I'm thinking about the real world, how do you practically steer an organization to a place of success and I'm concerned that overloading that question with theory is anti-productive. Is the leader's vision properly represented by the mission statement and is the leader capable and willing to do what it takes to steer their group to align with the mission statement's vision? For me, these are the questions because these are the real world issues facing a dysfunctional system.
It may also be that I'm looking at system failure and you're looking at system optimization, improving an otherwise functional system. I'm definitely looking at it from a perspective of system failure, situations where people are lying and stealing to the point where new foundations are cracking on multi-million dollar builds and massive amounts of money have been diverted into private pockets. When the system is broken like that, there is no functioning mission statement and there is no strong leadership and there is no vision. Organizations like that have been turned over to individual political agendas, the cancer that kills all organizations
The answer in those situations is not theoretical minutia but instead requires focusing on the big primary issues of performance. I'm not saying mission statements are some sort of panacea, but what I am arguing is that typing out a paragraph and issuing it to staff as a memo is not a mission statement in any practical or meaningful way. A mission statement is a living breathing ethos that, as a strong leader, you've pounded into the heads of your subordinates primarily by demonstrating it's application through your own leadership style/actions.
Again, for me, it all gets back to what exactly do you do in the face of severe dysfunction? How do you clean house and get the organization back on its feet to some degree of organizational success? For me, the answer is a strong vision/leadership/mission statement. Once that's been achieved, then there's room to discuss optimization.
One thing is for sure, we would all be in a better place if these were the kinds of conversations we focused on. Keep up the good work.
I think this is where we’re still talking past one another, and it’s not about theory versus practice or semantics.
We’re starting from different problem frames.
You’re approaching this from situations of severe system failure such as fraud, theft, political capture, where the immediate question is how to stop the bleeding and restore basic performance. In that context, strong leadership, a clear vision, and a mission that is actively lived and enforced are absolutely necessary. Without those, there is nothing to stabilize or rebuild around.
I’m coming at this from a governance perspective that looks at why systems fail even when leaders believe they are doing the right things. In my experience, dysfunction often persists not because no one articulated a mission, but because incentives, decision rights, information flows, and routines allow incoherent behavior to survive under pressure. That failure mode is observable, auditable, and material.
So when I talk about coherence, I’m not dismissing leadership or mission statements, nor am I focused only on optimization after the fact. I’m pointing to whether the system’s internal logic actually reinforces the stated intent once trade-offs, uncertainty, and stress show up. Mission statements can be powerful pressure points, but they do not reliably function as governing mechanisms on their own.
Bottom line: you’re focused on leadership as the primary lever for recovering a broken system; I’m focused on whether the system itself is designed to behave coherently once leadership intent collides with reality. Both matter—but they solve different problems, and confusing them is where organizations get into trouble. Thanks for the great debate!
This helps so much! I've been trying to explain this (or something closely related), but couldn't get a grip on a really clear distinction between the two concepts and where they differ. I guess, I will just memorize your article for future discussions ;)
I keep feeling like you are articulating things I am struggling to get out of my head. I find myself sharing your posts with colleagues and saying, "this is what I have been trying to explain...." I found my way to Dave Snowden's work through Max Boisot as I thought about collaborative KM and collective action in the US public education sector. I started in systems theory as one of Helmut Willke's doctoral students at Uni Bielefeld, but struggled with how to think about supporting improvement in complex settings. That's where Boisot and Snowden shed some light on my thinking.
I find the content you have been sharing accessible and timely for the work I am doing, and I am very grateful.
I am so appreciative of your kind words - I am glad that I am able to positively impact my readers. Thank you! I realized I had to make my work more accessible after I started talking about complexity with my friends and colleagues and they looked at me like I was speaking in tongues.
This analysis strikes me as confused. Alignment with what? What's missing here is a discussion of mission statements. How do you create a mission statement and how do you lead a group in supporting that mission statement. That's where the rubber hits the road. If mission statements are understood to be living concepts, and human nature as the primary dynamic, then the issue of collaboration becomes a matter of understanding the relationship between human nature and stated goals. Maybe if we focused on human nature we would spend more time focusing on self knowledge and the role it plays in facilitating group dynamics. To me, that's the problem, we live in a society that refuses to support individual understanding of the self. We cry for the benefits of self knowledge but then refuse it because to do so would decentralized the narrative.
Thank you for engaging so thoughtfully. I focus on coherence because it operates at a different level than mission statements. Alignment asks, “Are we pointing in the same direction?” Mission statements can help with that, but coherence asks, “Do our objectives, routines, decisions, information flows, and interactions actually produce the conditions for delivering on the mission?” In practice, many organizations have mission statements but still struggle because the system behaves incoherently.
You are absolutely right that human nature, self-knowledge, and meaning-making matter. In our framework, these sit inside the behavioural and relational elements of coherence: how people interpret goals, how they make trade-offs, how they interact under pressure, and how they navigate ambiguity. Coherence does not downplay self-knowledge; it shows why it is insufficient on its own. Without systemic coherence, even highly self-aware individuals get pulled into conflicting priorities, unclear authority, and structural noise.
So mission statements help with intent, alignment helps with shared direction, but coherence is where execution, behaviour, and system dynamics finally match the aspiration.
Super sharp distinction here. The bit about how alignment evaporates under pressure while coherence endures really nails something I've seen in crossfunctional teams. Everyone agrees in the kickoff meeting, but then when actual tradeoffs come up, people default to their local incentives rather than the shared vision. Coherence is basically asking whether the org's operating system is actually configured to support what leadership says it wants, not just whether people nod along in meetings.
Thanks for sharing your observation - everyone is aligned until their annual performance rating and bonus (if those are still paid these days) is at risk. Did you ever come across an example where defaulting to local incentives was set aside for the greater good of the project?
Okay, it just seems like you're asking the concept of coherence to do the kind of heavy lifting that I think can otherwise be done with a properly designed and executed mission statement. When you talk about objectives and routines etc, that sounds to me like analyzing whether the mission statement is being ideally executed. It's possible we are just be dancing around semantics. I was a government fraud investigator so I see things from the perspective of how bad performance can be avoided using the existing tools in place. I always enjoy reading your posts.
I don’t think this is a question of semantics, and I don’t see coherence as doing work that a well-crafted mission statement can otherwise perform.
From an internal audit (I am a CIA and CRMA) and governance perspective, mission statements are important signalling tools, but they are not operative mechanisms. In practice, they rarely govern how trade-offs are resolved, how timing decisions are made, or how priorities are recalibrated when conditions change. Assessing whether a mission statement is being “properly executed” assumes that the mission itself is sufficient to guide behaviour under uncertainty. My experience has been that it is not.
When I refer to coherence, I am pointing to a system-level property: whether objectives, decision rights, incentives, routines, and information flows reinforce one another over time, especially under pressure. Organizations often comply with their stated mission while still behaving incoherently at the operational and strategic level. That gap is observable, auditable, and material.
So the distinction I’m drawing is not linguistic. It is about the limits of static governance artifacts versus the need to understand and govern how the system actually behaves. Mission statements express intent; coherence determines whether that intent survives contact with reality.
Maybe this is a conversation about the quality of leadership. For my perspective, a strong leader with a vision can use a mission statement to do anything. There is value in theory and then there's the real world of exactly what do you do next. What you're calling an artifact, I'm calling a pressure point. Understanding how a system actually behaves in the context of overt dysfunction doesn't require special theory.
If all you're using the mission statement to do is express intent, then you're underutilizing the mission statement. I guess what I'm pushing for is the concept of the mission statement itself, a holistic model that incorporates every facet of the objective, including human nature. If any aspect of the mission statement is unrealized, that requires analysis and action including figuring out who, what, how, where and when.
I'm thinking about the real world, how do you practically steer an organization to a place of success and I'm concerned that overloading that question with theory is anti-productive. Is the leader's vision properly represented by the mission statement and is the leader capable and willing to do what it takes to steer their group to align with the mission statement's vision? For me, these are the questions because these are the real world issues facing a dysfunctional system.
It may also be that I'm looking at system failure and you're looking at system optimization, improving an otherwise functional system. I'm definitely looking at it from a perspective of system failure, situations where people are lying and stealing to the point where new foundations are cracking on multi-million dollar builds and massive amounts of money have been diverted into private pockets. When the system is broken like that, there is no functioning mission statement and there is no strong leadership and there is no vision. Organizations like that have been turned over to individual political agendas, the cancer that kills all organizations
The answer in those situations is not theoretical minutia but instead requires focusing on the big primary issues of performance. I'm not saying mission statements are some sort of panacea, but what I am arguing is that typing out a paragraph and issuing it to staff as a memo is not a mission statement in any practical or meaningful way. A mission statement is a living breathing ethos that, as a strong leader, you've pounded into the heads of your subordinates primarily by demonstrating it's application through your own leadership style/actions.
Again, for me, it all gets back to what exactly do you do in the face of severe dysfunction? How do you clean house and get the organization back on its feet to some degree of organizational success? For me, the answer is a strong vision/leadership/mission statement. Once that's been achieved, then there's room to discuss optimization.
One thing is for sure, we would all be in a better place if these were the kinds of conversations we focused on. Keep up the good work.
I think this is where we’re still talking past one another, and it’s not about theory versus practice or semantics.
We’re starting from different problem frames.
You’re approaching this from situations of severe system failure such as fraud, theft, political capture, where the immediate question is how to stop the bleeding and restore basic performance. In that context, strong leadership, a clear vision, and a mission that is actively lived and enforced are absolutely necessary. Without those, there is nothing to stabilize or rebuild around.
I’m coming at this from a governance perspective that looks at why systems fail even when leaders believe they are doing the right things. In my experience, dysfunction often persists not because no one articulated a mission, but because incentives, decision rights, information flows, and routines allow incoherent behavior to survive under pressure. That failure mode is observable, auditable, and material.
So when I talk about coherence, I’m not dismissing leadership or mission statements, nor am I focused only on optimization after the fact. I’m pointing to whether the system’s internal logic actually reinforces the stated intent once trade-offs, uncertainty, and stress show up. Mission statements can be powerful pressure points, but they do not reliably function as governing mechanisms on their own.
Bottom line: you’re focused on leadership as the primary lever for recovering a broken system; I’m focused on whether the system itself is designed to behave coherently once leadership intent collides with reality. Both matter—but they solve different problems, and confusing them is where organizations get into trouble. Thanks for the great debate!
This helps so much! I've been trying to explain this (or something closely related), but couldn't get a grip on a really clear distinction between the two concepts and where they differ. I guess, I will just memorize your article for future discussions ;)
I keep feeling like you are articulating things I am struggling to get out of my head. I find myself sharing your posts with colleagues and saying, "this is what I have been trying to explain...." I found my way to Dave Snowden's work through Max Boisot as I thought about collaborative KM and collective action in the US public education sector. I started in systems theory as one of Helmut Willke's doctoral students at Uni Bielefeld, but struggled with how to think about supporting improvement in complex settings. That's where Boisot and Snowden shed some light on my thinking.
I find the content you have been sharing accessible and timely for the work I am doing, and I am very grateful.
I am so appreciative of your kind words - I am glad that I am able to positively impact my readers. Thank you! I realized I had to make my work more accessible after I started talking about complexity with my friends and colleagues and they looked at me like I was speaking in tongues.
This is great thinking. A very useful distinction for things that are way too easy to conflate.
This analysis strikes me as confused. Alignment with what? What's missing here is a discussion of mission statements. How do you create a mission statement and how do you lead a group in supporting that mission statement. That's where the rubber hits the road. If mission statements are understood to be living concepts, and human nature as the primary dynamic, then the issue of collaboration becomes a matter of understanding the relationship between human nature and stated goals. Maybe if we focused on human nature we would spend more time focusing on self knowledge and the role it plays in facilitating group dynamics. To me, that's the problem, we live in a society that refuses to support individual understanding of the self. We cry for the benefits of self knowledge but then refuse it because to do so would decentralized the narrative.
Thank you for engaging so thoughtfully. I focus on coherence because it operates at a different level than mission statements. Alignment asks, “Are we pointing in the same direction?” Mission statements can help with that, but coherence asks, “Do our objectives, routines, decisions, information flows, and interactions actually produce the conditions for delivering on the mission?” In practice, many organizations have mission statements but still struggle because the system behaves incoherently.
You are absolutely right that human nature, self-knowledge, and meaning-making matter. In our framework, these sit inside the behavioural and relational elements of coherence: how people interpret goals, how they make trade-offs, how they interact under pressure, and how they navigate ambiguity. Coherence does not downplay self-knowledge; it shows why it is insufficient on its own. Without systemic coherence, even highly self-aware individuals get pulled into conflicting priorities, unclear authority, and structural noise.
So mission statements help with intent, alignment helps with shared direction, but coherence is where execution, behaviour, and system dynamics finally match the aspiration.