Why So Many Leadership Challenges Feel Different Now
(Part 1 in our 3-part Coherence Blog Series)
Restoring Coherence in a Fragmented Age
Over the past several years, I have listened to leaders describe remarkably similar challenges: burnout, communication breakdowns, disengagement, decision fatigue, eroding trust, and rising strain. The details vary. The tension does not.
Increasingly, I have found myself wondering whether these are truly separate problems at all. What if they are symptoms of something deeper?
What if we are experiencing a loss of coherence?
Organizations today are operating in environments shaped by technological acceleration, economic uncertainty, information overload, and increasing complexity. Many leadership approaches that worked well in more stable conditions are now being asked to hold realities they were never designed to carry.
As a result, leaders often find themselves working harder simply to preserve what once seemed to happen naturally. They spend more time creating clarity, absorbing ambiguity, repairing misalignment, and compensating for breakdowns that more coherent systems once held on their own.
For me, understanding organizational coherence and learning how to cultivate it has become one of the defining leadership questions of our time.
Defining Coherence, Systems, and Structure
Before discussing coherence at the organizational level, it is helpful to define three terms that ground this discussion: coherence, systems, and structure.
Coherence
The HeartMath Institute defines coherence as a measurable physiological state in which the heart, brain, nervous system, and emotions become synchronized and work together efficiently. Individuals experiencing the state of coherence report greater clarity, emotional regulation, resilience, creativity, and access to higher-order thinking.
Coherence is not merely a feeling. It is an observable, measurable, and replicable state of alignment within a living system. What intrigues me about HeartMath’s work was not simply the physiological measurement. It is the possibility that coherence might be a useful lens for understanding larger human systems as well.
Just as coherence in a person reflects alignment among multiple internal systems, organizational coherence reflects alignment among purpose, people, processes, decisions, and accountability structures. The same principle applies at a larger scale: when the parts of a system reinforce one another, energy flows more effectively, adaptation becomes possible, and the system functions with greater alignment, focus, integrity, and accountability even under pressure.
Systems
A system is a collection of interconnected elements whose behavior emerges from the relationships among those elements rather than from the elements themselves.
Living systems, including human beings, teams, organizations, communities, and ecosystems, are adaptive. They respond to changing conditions, learn through feedback, and continually reorganize in response to internal and external pressures.
The behavior of a living system cannot be fully understood by examining individual parts in isolation. It emerges from the interactions between those parts.
Structure
Structure refers to the patterns, agreements, roles, processes, decision rights, communication systems, priorities and constraints that shape how a system operates.
Structure is not the opposite of freedom.
In healthy living systems, structure creates the conditions that make freedom possible. Without sufficient structure, systems become noisy and fragmented. With too much structure, they become rigid and unable to adapt. Coherence emerges when structure provides enough stability to support adaptation without suppressing it.
An Orchestra is a Living System
Consider an orchestra.
Each musician is responsible for tuning their own instrument. This is individual coherence. The violinist, the percussionist, and the cellist each bring their own skill, discipline, and preparation.
But an orchestra is not simply a collection of talented musicians. The performance emerges from the interactive relationships between them:
- The score provides structure.
- The conductor provides direction.
- The musicians bring awareness, experience, skill, and talent.
- The shared tempo creates coordination.
If every musician played whatever they wanted, freedom would increase, but coherence would disappear. If the conductor attempted to control every note and every nuance, structure would increase, but creativity and responsiveness would vanish.
The beauty of the performance emerges because structure and freedom exist together.
The musicians remain distinct.
The instruments remain distinct.
Yet something larger emerges that none could create alone.
That is coherence.
Organizations function much the same way and most leaders intuitively recognize coherence when they experience it. The challenge is that few have language for it, making it difficult to understand, discuss, or intentionally cultivate.
Individual capability matters. Talent matters. Expertise matters. But performance ultimately depends on how alignment to shared purpose, roles, decisions, communication, and accountability interact within the larger system.
A coherent organization is not one where everyone agrees. It is an organization where differences can be coordinated in service of a shared outcome while maintaining focus and integrity, adapting intelligently, and remaining aligned with purpose under changing conditions.
The Coherence Crisis
“Social polarization is not just a political issue; it’s a human crisis that could redefine the way we connect, communicate, and coexist.” — Futurist, Thomas Frey
The symptoms are everywhere. We spend a great deal of time talking about polarization. It is glaringly present in our politics, our organizations, and our social systems, as though it were the problem itself. We debate positions, defend perspectives, and search for better arguments, all while assuming that if we could just persuade one another, something fundamental would shift.
But what if polarization is not the root condition? What if it is simply a symptom?
What we may be facing is a loss of coherence.
Fragmentation has become a defining experience of modern life: fragmentation of attention, identity, responsibility, and trust. The organizations we inhabit are evolving faster than the leadership models designed to guide them. As a result, meaning breaks down, standards blur, and people default to judgment to regain a sense of orientation.
Polarization may be less a failure of character than a signal of systems struggling to contain complexity. When our capacity to hold multiple perspectives weakens, certainty becomes attractive. Judgment of others and divisiveness often follow.
If the conditions creating fragmentation are not temporary, what capacities will leaders need to develop that were not required before? I do not claim to know the full answer, but I believe it is a question worth asking.
Nowhere is that question more consequential than in our workplaces.
When I first noticed it
In my own leadership work, I began to notice coherence eroding before any formal performance issue appeared. Meetings were still cordial. Metrics had not yet declined. From the outside, very little looked different. But something in the atmosphere had shifted. Decisions lost momentum. Ambiguity lingered longer than it should have. I found myself clarifying what should have been clear, steadying conversations, and monitoring team dynamics that once regulated themselves.
At first, I told myself this was simply part of leadership. Over time, I came to see something else: it was not a call for more effort from me, but a signal that coherence was beginning to fray. The more I compensated for that emerging incoherence, the more the system quietly adapted around my compensation. What looked like helpful leadership on the surface was, in some ways, postponing the maturity the organization needed.
Organizational Coherence
Organizational coherence is the capacity of a system to align around shared purpose so that energy flows, differences can be held, and adaptation can occur without fragmentation.
In practical terms, coherence exists when purpose, roles, decisions, and accountability reinforce one another rather than compete.
When that happens, energy moves, information flows, and differences can be held without collapsing into blame or rigidity. People understand what is expected of them, how their work connects to the larger effort, and why it matters.
When coherence is present, systems can absorb disruption without splintering. When it is absent, even minor strain can produce uncertainty, confusion, defensiveness, and blame.
This can be observed across living systems: the right constraints support adaptation. Freedom without structure creates noise. Structure without meaning creates compliance. Coherence requires both.
Organizations as Living Systems
Organizations are living systems, and so are the people within them. Every structure we create eventually interacts with human hopes, fears, aspirations, and limitations. The quality of that interaction often determines whether a system becomes more coherent or more fragmented over time.
Yet many organizations continue to operate from assumptions developed during the industrial era: that performance improves through greater predictability and more detailed management of individual parts. These approaches were highly effective in more stable environments. Today’s conditions, however, are shaped by complexity, interdependence, and rapid change. Under these circumstances, leadership becomes less about controlling individual components and more about creating coherence across the whole system.
Like a conductor leading an orchestra, leaders align diverse people, functions, and perspectives around a shared purpose, creating conditions under which coordinated performance can emerge. The goal is not uniformity, but coherence.
When coherence erodes, leaders often experience it indirectly as disengagement, erosion of standards, persistent tension around accountability, performance issues, or the sense that too much energy is being spent managing relationships rather than doing meaningful work.
Where Fragmentation First Appears
Fragmentation rarely enters a workplace as open conflict. It begins as a subtle redirection of attention outward: toward what others are doing wrong, why “they” do not get it, or how external forces are to blame. This outward fixation is rarely malicious. It is often the nervous system’s response to uncertainty, ambiguity, and inconsistency.
But judgment is never neutral.
In human systems, attention is participatory. Where we focus, our mindset, how we interpret, and what we judge all shape the state of the system itself. As accountability becomes unclear, people fill the gap with stories rather than agreements. Certainty calcifies and replaces curiosity. Energy gets trapped in explanations and justifications rather than execution.
This is not a moral failure of the individuals within an organization.
It is what systems do when coherence collapses.
A Different Question
If burnout, anxiety, disengagement, polarization, and accountability challenges are symptoms rather than root causes, then perhaps the leadership challenge before us is different than we have assumed.
Perhaps the question is not: How do we solve each of these problems?
Perhaps the question is: How do we restore coherence?
That question has become increasingly important to me because coherence changes how we understand people, performance, accountability, and culture. It shifts our attention from isolated behaviors to the relationships that create them.
And it may be one of the defining leadership questions of our time.
What can you do?
Leaders & Teams
- Pay attention to where energy is being spent. Is the team focused on purpose, execution, and learning—or on blame, confusion, and interpretation?
- Clarify expectations and decision rights. Fragmentation often begins where clarity ends.
- Look for recurring friction. Friction is often a signal of incoherence. Clarify purpose, intended results, communication flows and accountability.
- Discuss coherence openly. Give the team language for what they are experiencing.
Individuals
- Notice where your attention goes during uncertainty. Do you move toward curiosity or judgment?
- Identify one area of your life where ambiguity is draining energy and create greater clarity.
- Ask yourself: “What story am I telling about this situation?” Then separate the story from the observable facts.
- Practice noticing when you feel fragmented, distracted, or reactive without judging yourself for it.
Reflection Question
Where is fragmentation showing up and what might it be trying to tell me?
Author: Anne McGhee-Stinson, InteraWorks, Managing Partner
About InteraWorks
InteraWorks is a global learning company on a mission to elevate the human experience at work. Specializing in professional development and performance enablement, we offer top-rated learning programs based on four defined conditions that must exist for individuals, teams including Effective Edge, Best Year Yet, and the Essentials series. Our integrated learning framework and online tools generate immediate and sustainable breakthroughs in performance. Through decades of working at all levels in enterprise companies across many industries, we’ve built a reputation for helping people and organizations harness their focus, mindset, talent, and energy to produce results that matter most.
We’ve defined four conditions that must exist for an individual, team, or organization to be effective within the arena of performance and development; Accountability, Focus, Alignment, and Integrity. We’ll continue to explore these and more in our blog and look forward to your engagement and interaction with us. Stay tuned as we engage the edges.