Organizations Measure Confidence. What About Coherence?

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Organizations have become increasingly sophisticated at measuring engagement, culture, leadership, communication, and employee experience. These measures provide valuable insights into how people feel about their work and the organizations they belong to. Yet many organizations continue to encounter a familiar challenge: capable people working toward the same goals still struggle to coordinate effectively.

Understanding the Problem

Most leaders will recognize the symptoms. Priorities drift during implementation. Decisions that appeared settled resurface months later. Teams discover they have been working from different assumptions. Projects slow down as dependencies break down, and additional meetings are needed to reconnect efforts that have gradually drifted apart.

The usual explanations point to communication, leadership, culture, or resistance to change. Sometimes those explanations are correct. However, they do not always explain why intelligent, committed people who have access to the same information often move in different directions.

A different possibility is that the challenge begins with interpretation.

Research spanning mental models, sense-making, shared cognition, team learning, and team effectiveness suggests that people do not simply receive information and act upon it. They interpret it. They construct meaning from their experiences, expertise, assumptions, and context. As a result, two people can attend the same meeting, hear the same presentation, and leave with different understandings of what was discussed and what should happen next.

This distinction is important because communication and shared understanding are not the same thing.

Specialty Credential: People Analytics

Coherence is the Key

Organizations routinely measure confidence in understanding. Employees are asked whether the strategy is clear. Teams are asked whether priorities are understood. Leaders are asked whether communication has been effective. These questions provide useful information, but they tell us relatively little about whether people have actually developed compatible understandings of the issues they are discussing.

In other words, organizations measure confidence. Very few measure coherence.

By coherence, I mean the degree to which people hold sufficiently compatible understandings of priorities, responsibilities, dependencies, risks, and success criteria to coordinate action effectively. Coherence does not require agreement. Teams can disagree vigorously and still maintain a highly coherent understanding of the situation they face. Equally, groups can appear to agree while holding very different assumptions about what was decided and what should happen next.

This distinction may help explain why organizations sometimes experience coordination challenges despite positive results across more traditional measures. People may be highly engaged, strongly committed, and confident in their understanding, while simultaneously operating from different interpretations of the same situation.

For people analytics, this raises an interesting question. What if one of the next frontiers is not simply measuring what individuals think, feel, or experience, but understanding whether groups interpret important issues in sufficiently similar ways to coordinate effectively?

What Lies Ahead

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) may make this increasingly practical. Approaches that were once difficult to scale are becoming more accessible, creating opportunities to examine patterns of interpretation across teams and organizations in ways that were previously difficult to achieve.

As organizations become more specialized, interconnected, and dependent on collaboration across diverse areas of expertise, the ability to develop shared understanding may become increasingly important. If so, understanding interpretation coherence may help organizations identify coordination risks earlier, strengthen delivery effectiveness, and gain a clearer picture of how individual understanding becomes collective performance.

The question we have to ask is simple. We have become very good at measuring whether people believe they understand. Perhaps it is time to ask whether they understand each other sufficiently to work effectively together.

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Mirror Mirror founder and CEO Lindsay Uittenbogaard works at the intersection of communication, coordination, and organizational performance.