Sonja Blignaut on More Beyond wrote a good post “All that jazz … making coherence coherent” on coherence where she states at the end “In order to remain competitive and thrive in the new world of work, we need to focus our organization design, leadership and strategic efforts on the complex contexts and create the conditions for coherence. “

Ms. Blignaut defines coherence mainly through analogy and metaphor, so I strongly recommend reading the original post.

In my post “Forget the technology, Quality 4.0 is all about thinking” I spelled out some principles of system design.

Principle	Description
Balance	The system creates value for the multiple stakeholders. While the ideal is to develop a design that maximizes the value for all the key stakeholders, the designer often has to compromise and balance the needs of the various stakeholders.
Congruence	The degree to which the system components are aligned and consistent with each other and the other organizational systems, culture, plans, processes, information, resource decisions, and actions.
Convenience	The system is designed to be as convenient as possible for the participants to implement (a.k.a. user friendly). System includes specific processes, procedures, and controls only when necessary.
Coordination	System components are interconnected and harmonized with the other (internal and external) components, systems, plans, processes, information, and resource decisions toward common action or effort. This is beyond congruence and is achieved when the individual components of a system operate as a fully interconnected unit.
Elegance	Complexity vs. benefit — the system includes only enough complexity as is necessary to meet the stakeholder’s needs. In other words, keep the design as simple as possible and no more while delivering the desired benefits. It often requires looking at the system in new ways.
Human	Participants in the system are able to find joy, purpose and meaning in their work.
Learning	Knowledge management, with opportunities for reflection and learning (learning loops), is designed into the system. Reflection and learning are built into the system at key points to encourage single- and double-loop learning from experience to improve future implementation and to systematically evaluate the design of the system itself.
Sustainability	The system effectively meets the near- and long-term needs of the current stakeholders without compromising the ability of future generations of stakeholders to meet their own needs.

I used the term congruence to summarize the point Ms. Blignaut is reaching with alignment and coherence. I love her putting these against the Cynefin framework, it makes a great of sense to see alignment for the obvious domain and the need for coherence driving from complexity.

So what might a drive for coherence look like? Well if we start with coherence being the long-range order (the jazz analogy) we are building systems that build order through their function – they learn and are sustainable.

To apply this in the framework of ICHQ10 or the US FDA’s “Guidance for Industry Quality Systems Approach to Pharmaceutical CGMP Regulations” one way to drive for coherence is to use similar building blocks across our systems: risk management, data integrity, and knowledge management are all examples of that.