The Illusion of Coherence (and Why Big Companies No Longer Have It) Part I
Why Organizations Can’t Standardize on a Single Reality
For decades, we’ve told ourselves a comforting little bedtime story about leadership:
“The CEO has a coherent vision, and the organization follows it.”
This was mostly true back when companies lived in one building, markets moved like glaciers, and the sum total of corporate “data” was 11 spreadsheets, three memos, and whatever lived inside the heads of two cranky VPs and a receptionist who actually knew everything.
Back then, coherence wasn’t something executives created.
Coherence was something reality forced on you.
You couldn’t hold contradictory narratives because you didn’t have contradictory data.
You couldn’t drown in dashboards because dashboards didn’t exist.
You couldn’t be “data-driven” because half the data was handwritten and the other half lived in filing cabinets.
Information wasn’t scarce.
But the ability to store it was.
And that limitation, bizarrely, made leadership easier.
It allowed organizations to do something miraculous:
Be wrong in unison.
That’s what alignment used to be.
Not accuracy — synced ignorance.
Everyone shared the same limited view of the world, so everyone acted coherently, even if the picture was incomplete.
Then digital happened, storage got cheap, and the illusion collapsed.
Suddenly we could capture everything:
every email
every metric
every dashboard
every AI summary
every decision
every meeting transcript
every Slack message from 2017 that should have died long ago
It was like switching from a backyard telescope to the James Webb Observatory.
Everything became visible — including the contradictions we used to gloss over.
And here’s the twist:
**Information has always been infinite.
We’ve just never had the capacity to store the infinite before.**
Now we do.
And we’re discovering that infinite storage produces infinite interpretations.
Which is why modern organizations don’t suffer from “misalignment.”
They suffer from epistemic multiverses:
Marketing lives in Timeline A
Finance lives in Timeline B
Product lives in Timeline C
Leadership lives in a PowerPoint timeline where everything always starts next quarter
And AI lives in Timeline WTF, where everything is simultaneously true, false, and a hallucination
No wonder everyone’s exhausted.
The CEO used to maintain coherence because the world was small enough for that to be possible.
When your company lived in one building, your entire leadership team had the same model of reality:
the same premises
the same constraints
the same customer stories
the same folklore
the same gossip
the same hallway conversations
the same tribal memory
Coherence wasn’t a skill.
Coherence was a side effect of proximity.
But once companies became distributed — across countries, cultures, tools, dashboards, AI agents, and time zones — coherence didn’t scale with them.
The CEO’s role didn’t get worse.
The environment outgrew the geometry of centralized interpretation.
**So what do we do now?
We pretend.**
We pretend “data-driven” is a leadership philosophy rather than a highly structured form of self-delusion.
Being “data-driven” in a modern corporation is like trying to steer a ship by studying the waves.
Data describes the past with increasing detail, and increasing confidence, but zero humility.
And here’s the scandal:
**Data never tells you what something means.
It only tells you what happened.
Meaning is still up for grabs.**
Which is why, when confronted with too much data, executives fall back on the only tool guaranteed to produce a decision on schedule:
intuition.
But intuition without shared context becomes:
executive mood swings
political noise
“I have a feeling” disguised as strategy
“strong opinions, weakly remembered”
a 27-page deck created to justify what someone already believed at lunch
Intuition works when everyone shares the same worldview.
When they don’t, intuition becomes the loudest plausible guess wins.
**The real problem isn’t too much information.
It’s too many incompatible interpretations.**
What breaks coherence isn’t data volume.
It’s meaning divergence.
And in a world where:
every system defines objects differently
every tool encodes a different worldview
every team tells a different story
every metric contradicts the next
every AI assistant improvises its own version of reality
The CEO no longer stands at the top of a pyramid of knowledge.
They stand at the intersection of twelve competing realities and are expected to pretend those realities all agree.
This is why so many leadership decisions feel arbitrary (even when they aren’t).
It’s not incompetence.
It’s interpretation overload.
Human minds were not built to reconcile that much conceptual drift.
**So the solution is not “better filtering.”
Filtering is what we already do — badly.**
Filtering information is trivial.
Everyone does it.
Every dashboard does it.
Every AI model does it automatically.
Filtering doesn’t create coherence.
Filtering just reduces visibility until a decision feels emotionally tolerable.
The real move — the necessary move — is something much deeper:
A shared system of meaning.
Not shared data.
Not shared dashboards.
Not shared KPIs.
A shared way of deciding what reality means.
That means:
**1. Shared assumptions
Shared definitions
Shared causal models
Shared interpretation loops
Shared lineage and rationale**
This is what every big organization is missing —
and what every CEO is secretly trying to recreate using personal charisma, executive presence, or brute-force communication.
But charisma is not a coherence engine.
And communication is not interpretation.
**The CEO’s real job now is not to provide the vision.
It’s to choose which reality the organization is going to inhabit.**
Because right now, every large company is a multiverse.
Everyone is smart.
Everyone is right.
Everyone is operating rationally from their vantage point.
And the CEO isn’t choosing between strategies.
They’re choosing between worldviews.
They’re choosing:
which assumptions we accept
which definitions we unify
which meaning system we standardize
which causal story wins
which interpretation becomes reality
This — not “setting direction” — is the real job of leadership now.
And until organizations build the shared meaning architecture required to support it, coherence will remain what it currently is:
**The last great corporate magic trick —
and the first illusion to fail at scale.**
If you want, I can create:
A banner image
A shorter “note” version
A follow-up post: “Why Data-Driven Was Always a Religion, Not a Methodology”
A Part 2: “How to Build Shared Meaning Inside a Fragmented Organization”