Coherence is a positive quality
Systemicity describes the character of the reality an enterprise must navigate. Coherence describes the quality of the enterprise’s relationship to and movement through that reality.
Greater genuine coherence is economically favorable relative to less coherence, holding the relevant reality and objective constant. That does not mean every process intended to create coherence is useful. Committees, analysis, governance, architecture, integration, AI systems, and other mechanisms can add cost or even deepen incoherence. They are means, not coherence itself.
A coherent move can still encounter an adverse state of the world. An incoherent move can get lucky. Coherence is not the realized outcome by itself. It is the quality of the enterprise treatment relative to what could reasonably be known, constructed, and done at the time.
Coherence is not the machinery used to produce it
Several objects must remain distinct.
Coherence demand is the coherence required by the systemic condition and consequence at hand. Coherence capacity is the enterprise’s standing ability to produce coherence across changing situations. Achieved coherence is the coherence actually produced in a particular movement. The people, representations, workflows, technology, authority structures, decision practices, and other mechanisms used to produce it are separate again.
More machinery does not imply more coherence. A bounded move can be handled coherently with very little apparatus. A highly systemic move can require much more recomposition, observation, learning, and revision. The response should be proportionate to the reality.
Coherence continues through the move
Coherence is not exhausted by making a good initial decision. Economic logic can be lost as a commitment becomes capital allocation, architecture, contracts, systems, workflows, roles, and operating behavior.
Reality also returns new evidence. Implementation can expose dependencies, costs, bottlenecks, user behavior, new capabilities, and better alternatives. A coherent enterprise reconnects that evidence to the governing judgment strongly enough to confirm, alter, accelerate, reduce, reverse, or reopen the path.
The objective is not fidelity to the original plan. It is continued fidelity to the economics as reality changes.
Coherence is protective and generative
Coherence has a protective effect. It reduces avoidable degradation along paths the enterprise actually takes by improving framing, configuration, commitment, translation, realization, observation, learning, and revision.
It also has a generative effect. The enterprise can discover, construct, enable, compare, and reach valuable possibilities that would otherwise remain outside the effective opportunity set. A strong selection process applied to impoverished alternatives can still produce an inferior enterprise path.
When the ability to produce coherence becomes durable organizational capacity, it can also have a productive effect. The enterprise can make better use of existing assets and can make some more-systemic opportunities economically tractable.
Relationship to incoherence and value leakage
Incoherence is economically material inadequacy in the enterprise’s relationship to systemic reality and movement through it. It can enter when material reality is omitted, distorted, separated, mistranslated, allowed to go stale, or fails to alter enterprise action when it should.
Value leakage is the reasonably attainable value that fails to become realized. Greater coherence improves both protection against leakage on paths taken and discovery of valuable paths that otherwise never become real.
Bibliography
This doctrine sits adjacent to work on organizational information processing, systems and cybernetics, sensemaking, organizational learning, distributed cognition and knowledge, dynamic capabilities, high-reliability organizing, resilience, complementarities, and bounded rationality. Talbot West uses coherence for the positive quality of an enterprise’s relationship to and movement through systemic reality, not as a synonym for any one of those traditions.