Michael Lissack
advantages during disruptions, enabling the company to maintain supply continuity when competitors faced shortages. Purpose-Driven Alignment: In environments of high uncertainty and rapid change, detailed plans and rigid structures become liabilities. Coherent organizations maintain alignment through shared purpose and principles rather than prescriptive rules. This approach creates coherence while enabling adaptation to local conditions. A healthcare organization implementing this principle replaced its detailed policy manual with a set of core principles focused on patient well-being, continuous learning, and collaborative care. Teams through- out the organization had flexibility in how they implemented these prin- ciples based on local conditions, but decisions consistently aligned with the shared purpose. This approach improved both staff engagement and patient outcomes. Evolutionary Architecture: Rather than designing fixed structures that become obsolete as conditions change, complexity-adapted organi- zations create flexible architectures that can evolve over time. They build systems with modularity, interoperability, and adaptability as core design principles. An industrial equipment manufacturer embodied this principle in its product development process, creating a platform architecture with standardized interfaces that enabled continuous evolution of components without requiring redesign of the entire system. This approach allowed for more rapid innovation and adaptation to changing customer needs while maintaining coherence in the overall product portfolio. Collaborative Technology Integration: Technology in coherent organizations isn’t simply deployed to automate existing processes but is thoughtfully integrated to enhance human capabilities, enable new forms of collaboration, and create organizational intelligence greater than the sum of individual contributions. A professional services firm implementing this principle developed an integrated technology ecosystem that combined specialized exper- tise with collective intelligence. Rather than simply digitizing existing
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