Something Was Being Missed
Episode 05 of The Coherence Effect. If you are just joining — the series begins with You Already Know This.
After thirty-five years of watching the same cycle repeat, I knew something was being missed.
In capable organizations with smart leadership, real resources, and genuine intent to do things differently this time. Repeatedly, consistently - not occasionally.
The cycle was always some variation of the same story.
A new technology platform promised to transform operations. Or a structural reorganization was going to fix the coordination failures. Or a talent infusion — dozens of new hires with the right credentials — was going to bring the capability the organization had been lacking. The announcements were confident. The investment was real. The commitment from leadership was visible and, as far as I could tell, sincere.
And then, within six to nine months, the layoffs would come.
Because the organization had chased the solution before it understood the problem — and the gap between what was promised and what was delivered had become too expensive to sustain. The headcount that had been added to support the transformation became the cost reduction that followed it.
Then the hiring would start again.
I watched this cycle repeat across industries, across decades, across organizations that had every reason to break it and somehow never did. Manufacturing. Regulated industries. Professional services. The specific technology changed. The specific reorganization changed. The specific people changed. The outcome did not.
What I felt watching it was not frustration with the organizations or the leaders. Most of them were trying. Most of them believed in what they were doing.
What I felt was that something structural was being missed. That underneath the visible cycle — the investment, the promise, the disappointment, the reset — there were forces in discord. Something in the way these organizations were constituted was preventing them from sustaining the progress they were capable of making.
As the years accumulated, I watched something else happen that troubled me more than the cycle itself.
Values fell away to earnings targets. Principles fell away to press releases. The organizations that had once been willing to ask hard structural questions about themselves became organizations that managed the appearance of progress rather than the reality of it. The quarterly result became the organizing principle. Everything else — the people, the capability, the structural integrity of the organization — became a variable to be managed against it.
The cycle accelerated. The resets became more frequent. The human cost became more visible.
And still the same solutions were being proposed. More technology. Better processes. Different people. As if the problem had never been diagnosed correctly in the first place.
I started the research that became the Coherence Problem because I believed it had not been.
The dimensions every organization requires had each been studied in isolation. What had never been adequately named was the structural logic of what happens when they drift apart — and why every corrective organizations reach for consistently targets the wrong level of the problem.
The Coherence Problem is an attempt to provide that structural vocabulary. A diagnostic to use; not a framework to admire. A way of naming specifically what is out of balance — which failure mode is present, what it costs, and what the corrective is — so that organizations can stop cycling through solutions that address symptoms and start addressing sources.
Thirty-five years of watching the cycle convinced me the problem was real, structural, and solvable.
The vocabulary to solve it had been sitting in an unlikely place for sixteen centuries.
That is the story this research tells.
The Coherence Effect — Series Guide
Phase One — Human Foundation
01 · You Already Know This. You Just Haven’t Named It Yet.
02 · The Piano Man
03 · The Porch
04 · No Deck Required
05 · Something Was Being Missed
Phase Two — The Framework
06 · Your Diagnosis Is Probably Wrong
07 · Your Organization Isn’t Broken. It’s Incoherent.
Phase Three — The Case Studies
08 · Type I: Intent Subordination — The Boeing Story
09 · Type I: The Circuit Nobody Dropped
10 · Type II: Dimension Collapse — The Peloton Story
11 · Type III: Capability Inversion — The Haribo Story
12 · Types VI & VIII: The $42M That Was Never Missing
13 · Type IV: We Don’t Do That
14 · Type V: Authority Diffusion
15 · Type VII: Structural Theater
Phase Four — Series Close
16 · What Comes After the Diagnosis
PrecisionPath Consulting works with mid-market leadership teams who know something is wrong but can’t locate exactly where. The OCI Diagnostic identifies which of the eight coherence failure modes are costing your organization performance — and what to do about it.
Kent Hallmann is the founder of PrecisionPath Consulting. Thirty-five years diagnosing organizational friction at Deloitte, KPMG, Wipro, and SAP. Fixed fee. Defined scope. Senior practitioner on every engagement — no handoffs, no substitutes.
The Coherence Problem research: Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19456590 · SSRN http://ssrn.com/abstract=6479301