Let it also be coherent

‘Coherence’ is an underrated concept. I would describe it as consistence between the several parts of a system. I believe that everything and everyone is coherent. But many times not with what one would want. Our unconscious mind is really very powerful and most of the time we are not working towards our conscious goals but rather towards some obscure objective we will never comprehend.

Just like people, most organizations are not coherent with what they intend to be. Many times its individual parts (departments, languages, objectives, missions, people, etc.) are in conflict with each other. There are many reasons for this, but there is one that stands out in my mind.

In the XIXth century, probably the largest organization known in the planet was Napoleon’s Grand Armée (Great Army) which at some point had about 600,000 individuals in it. No commercial or industrial organization had anywhere near this kind of size. Yet, an army, still today, spends an awful lot of its time ensuring its coherence. It trains more often than it acts, and it invests tirelessly in language, in communications, in procedures, in the ability to perform coherently in the middle of chaos. Still, it usually fails in this goal when in the midst of the fog of war.

Today, there are in the world hundreds of companies with more than a hundred thousand people in them. It is said that Wal-Mart alone has more than one million employees. Yet, the effort that companies put into coherence is pitiful. The amount of time and resources a typical big company or organization (state or otherwise) squander in internal battles and incoherent strategies is, in my experience, ridiculous.

Incoherence breeds waste. So it is almost impossible to have a sustainable organization without coherence. A sustainable system must be coherent. And a coherent system will sooner or later be sustainable.

We have to invest a lot in coherence to have sustainability. This means a lot of analysis and a lot of difficult decisions. It also means a set of coherent values we can start from. Not those kinds of vague and forgotten values many companies frame and hang on the walls of their corridors, but rather a set of principles that actually stand for what we believe.

These principles don’t have to be there immediately from the outset. We can figure many of them out as we go. But in the least, they have to be coherent. And our acts have to be coherent with them.

There is a reason for the emergence of ethics in Human society. It is because being ethical works better than being unethical. You don’t believe me? Maybe you will one day.