Coherence drift
Gradually alignment and energy to the bigger picture drifted and now it feels more like lots of disparate actions than a coherent whole.
In the beginning, everyone was on the same page, pulling in the same direction. But over time, as new projects were added and partners pursued their own opportunities, that shared focus began to blur. Now, everyone is busy, and good work is happening in individual pockets, but it’s hard to see how all these activities add up to the systemic change we're aiming for. It feels like we're a collection of separate projects operating under the same banner, rather than a truly integrated effort. The connective tissue is missing, and we lack a clear, shared story that helps us align our work and ensure the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. How do we move from a portfolio of well-intentioned but disparate actions back to a powerful, coherent ecosystem of change?
Connecting Learnings to this Challenge
This gradual drift towards incoherence is a natural entropy in long-term collaborations, where individual pressures can easily pull focus from the collective goal. It requires intentional structures and practices to maintain a shared strategic focus.
Areas of the Many-to-Many System that aim to address this challenge
"Coherence drift" is often a sign of a weak strategic core and poor feedback loops. The following areas are designed to build and maintain the connective tissue needed for collective impact:
- Ecosystem Strategy: This is the primary area for addressing this challenge, as it provides a collaborative process for defining and maintaining a shared strategic focus that guides all activities.
- Missions: A clear, co-created Wide-Boundary Mission serves as a constant reference point, allowing all partners to ask, "Is my work serving this ultimate purpose?"
- Learning System: An effective learning system is crucial for detecting drift early and creating the feedback loops needed to bring projects back into strategic harmony.
- Stewardship Approaches: A key role of stewardship is to "hold the whole"—to notice when coherence is fading and to convene the necessary conversations to realign the work.
Tools and Examples linked to this Challenge
Moving from a powerful vision to a shared, actionable plan requires more than just good intentions—it requires practical scaffolding. The tools and examples below are designed to help with this critical transition. They offer tangible starting points for co-creating your initial strategy, defining roles, and building the momentum needed to move forward together.
Emergent strategy and learning
An overview of the strategy and learning approach taken in a systems change collaboration.
Open details →Alerts
Alerts are the critical 'watch-outs'—the common challenges, tensions, complexities, and areas where we learned special attention is required.
Learning deprioritisation
Once operating, the learning infrastructure is often the part that becomes de-prioritised when capacity and time is scarce. Beware! As this can drive fragmentation over time.
Insufficient capacity, time and resource given to collaborating
It is often significantly underestimated how much time and attention is needed for the organising, governing, learning, operating, practising, embodying and other systems needed in order to do good work collaboratively. When this is not given enough attention the conditions erode over time.
Forgetting that practice trumps design
While a governance approach can design a great container for the work, it is the practice of showing up together that most shapes the collaboration. Insufficient focus on practicing the behaviours, processes, capacities and methods to be in governance together can lead to poor governance cultures, whatever the beauty of the design.
Not inspecting the relational capacity of the system
Beware of going too hard and fast into polarising topics such as money before there is the relational capacity across the group to hold them.
Insights
Insights are the key discoveries that emerged from our work and point to promising pathways and core principles.
The interplay between the parts
We can spot patterns in how different infrastructures inform each other and use this to inform the order and process that we steward
Learning system
A learning system helps us to interpret progress, adapting strategies, and enabling the ongoing evolution of all other governance elements, ensuring the collaboration can dynamically live into its mission over time.
Ecosystem strategy
We can build an ecosystem strategy to hold just enough coherence for now without hindering emergence
Infrastructuring model
We can predict infrastructural elements that we might need to have in place