The Next Next Common Sense
Employee connection across generations. Coherent organiza- tions maintain cultural continuity even as employee populations change. Technology company IBM tracks narrative consistency across different employee cohorts, measuring how consistently longstanding employees and new hires describe the company’s essential character despite experi- encing different eras of its evolution. Brand recognition resilience. Organizations with high coherence maintain customer recognition of their essential identity despite signif- icant business model evolution. Financial services company American Express regularly measures how consistently customers recognize its core value proposition across different products and services. The measurement challenge here is distinguishing between essential identity elements (which should remain stable) and their manifestations (which should evolve). Organizations might track the consistent presence of core values in evolving business models or the maintenance of customer relationship quality through changing interaction channels, measuring coherence through continuity of essence rather than form. Tools for assessing complexity navigation capability Beyond these indicators, organizations need systematic approaches for assessing their overall complexity navigation capability. These assess- ment tools should themselves reflect complexity principles—focusing on patterns rather than isolated metrics, emphasizing relationships rather than components, and measuring adaptability rather than static states.
Coherence mapping
Coherence mapping visualizes the alignment between organizational elements, revealing patterns of coherence and decoherence across the system. This approach builds on traditional tools like strategy maps but focuses specifically on relationships between elements rather than the elements themselves.
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