The Next Next Common Sense
Response time to market signals. Coherent organizations detect and respond to relevant market shifts more rapidly than competitors. Cosmetics company Sephora’s “Innovation Lab” enables it to quickly iden- tify emerging beauty trends and integrate them into offerings without disrupting its core experience promise. The measurement challenge here isn’t capturing activity but distin- guishing between fundamental strategic shifts (which should be rare) and tactical adaptations (which should be continuous). Organizations might track the percentage of initiatives that continue through market changes versus those that are abandoned, measuring coherence through strategic persistence rather than tactical consistency. Distributed awareness of system dynamics In organizations that master complexity, understanding of how the system functions is broadly distributed rather than concentrated in spe- cialized roles. This pattern reflects coherence between organizational knowledge and individual capability. Technology company GitLab demonstrates this distributed aware- ness through its comprehensive handbook, which documents not just procedures but the reasoning behind them. Every team member can un- derstand how different components interact, enabling autonomous deci- sions that account for system-wide impacts. This distributed awareness manifests in several measurable indicators: Cross-boundary problem-solving capacity. When employees can effectively address issues that cross traditional organizational bound- aries, coherence is present. Manufacturing company Toyota measures this through its “andon cord” system, tracking how often and effectively team members from different specialties collaborate to resolve produc- tion issues. System-level language use. Organizations with high coherence exhibit consistent use of systems-oriented language across all levels. Financial technology company Stripe tracks the use of customer-impact
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