In the early stages of a client project, I asked the CEO for her view on why businesses fail. She had three goes at answering it before feeling that she’d got to the real reason, and the sharpest expression of it: “Losing focus”.
The first thing that struck me about that response was that it described self-inflicted failure. It wasn’t the market’s fault, and it wasn’t because of smart competitors; it was down to the leadership team’s inability to keep the organisation focused on – and aligned around – what matters most.
What happened next was interesting: almost simultaneously, we both said “incoherent”. It wasn’t a word I’d planned on using, and it’s not one I’ve often heard in business, perhaps a bit too abstract or academic. But the difference between coherence and incoherence can be massive – and it’s often visible long before the numbers prove it.
The symptoms are usually felt in either the organisation’s performance, its culture, or its reputation. Or any combination of them. Meetings being to multiply, yet decisions take longer; what used to be straightforward is now more complex, and people start to come up with their own work-arounds; leaders describe the business in different ways, and teams might be incentivised for hitting their own KPIs, while the stated values include “collaboration”; customers start to notice inconsistency and a drop in standards, opening up questions about price and value.
In my experience, understanding and treating these symptoms as isolated issues rarely solves them properly: they are, after all, just symptoms. What’s more important is to find the underlying cause, which takes me back to my client CEO’s observation.
It’s worth taking that comment apart:
“They make it too hard” means the organisation has become complicated, there’s friction and a loss of clarity. In the worst cases, the business feels like it’s serving itself.
“Align” describes consistency and commitment, a truly shared vision and set of values that people not only believe in but experience at every point of the organisation.
“What matters most” demands that leaders retain clarity and relevance. It holds leadership teams accountable in a way that other questions don’t.
The strongest organisations I’ve worked with haven’t necessarily been the biggest, or the most famous, or the best resourced. But there has always been something noticeably different about them: they met each of those three challenges. They had a special quality.
People “got” them, quickly and consistently. They made sense, so it was obvious what mattered. Leaders reinforced rather than contradicted each other, so everyone inside and outside the organisation had the same experience. The business generated momentum rather than friction, which made things easier for anyone working for or with them.
I’ve come to think that quality deserves a name. Coherence. And I suspect it’s more important than we often realise.