Systems Error

Why management keeps breaking, and what designed leadership looks like instead

Essay 3 of 13

How We Normalize an Incoherent System

If you listen closely to how organizations talk when performance starts to drift, the diagnosis is usually familiar.

We need stronger people. Better managers. More disciplined execution. Sharper accountability. A deeper bench. More leadership capacity.

Sometimes those things are genuinely needed. But often they are standing in for a harder admission: the organization is not suffering from a shortage of talent nearly as much as it is suffering from a shortage of coherence.

A talented organization can still be incoherent. It can be full of intelligent people, credible managers, and committed teams, yet still ask them to operate inside a system that sends conflicting signals. Strategy says one thing. Metrics reward another. Decision rights point somewhere else. Culture language celebrates collaboration while incentives quietly reward local wins. On paper, the organization has all the right parts. In practice, those parts do not hold together.

This is one reason so many capable organizations feel harder to work in than they should. The problem is not simply that people are underperforming. It is that they are often trying to perform inside an environment that does not line up with itself.

McKinsey’s work on organizational health points in this direction by arguing that long-term performance depends not only on strategy and results, but on whether the organization can align, execute, and renew itself over time. Harvard Business Review has made a related point from the human side: burnout is often less a story about fragile people than about workplaces that make competent effort unnecessarily expensive.

The problem after heroic effort is not only exhaustion. It is incoherence. The organization no longer suffers from one obvious defect. It suffers from too many partially disconnected systems trying to govern the same work at once.

And once that happens, even strong people begin to look inconsistent.

What coherence really means

Coherence is not the same thing as bureaucracy.

It is not an endless stack of policies or a rigid process for every decision. Coherence simply means that the major pieces of the system are pointed in roughly the same direction and are not constantly tripping over one another.

In a coherent system, strategy is clear enough that people can tell what matters more and what matters less. Priorities follow from that strategy instead of contradicting it. Decision rights are explicit enough that work does not stall in approval limbo. Metrics support the strategy instead of pulling attention somewhere else. Incentives and recognition reinforce the behavior the organization says it wants. Information flows to where decisions actually get made.

None of that requires perfection. It does require that the system, taken as a whole, is not working at cross-purposes with itself.

In an incoherent system, by contrast, each piece can make sense on its own. The strategy deck reads well. The values sound right. The metrics dashboard looks sophisticated. The performance process feels thorough. The problem is that the pieces do not agree on what they are asking people to do.

That disagreement is where the shortage of coherent systems shows up.

How incoherence gets misread as a talent problem

When systems are incoherent, good people start producing uneven results.

A leader who is told to go faster is routed through three additional approval layers. A team that is told to be more customer-centric is measured only on short-term revenue. A manager who is asked to develop people is given a span of control and meeting load that makes actual coaching nearly impossible.

From a distance, it looks like a talent problem. Upper management wonders why the operating teams keep hiring the wrong people and quietly asks, “How can we trust them if they can’t even pick good talent?” Up close, those same people often look exactly like what they were on paper: capable operators trying to work in a system that cannot decide what it wants from them.

Incoherence is especially good at making strong people look unreliable.

On Monday, the safe move is to follow the stated process. On Wednesday, the safe move is to bypass it so a senior leader is not embarrassed in front of a customer. On Friday, the safe move is to slow down and ask for alignment. Whatever choice someone makes, it will be the wrong one for at least one of the signals they are receiving.

Over time, this produces a pattern that is easy to misinterpret. Leaders see inconsistency in outcomes and conclude that they need higher-caliber people. What they are often seeing instead is high-caliber people adapting, day by day, to conflicting instructions from the system.

What incoherence feels like inside the work

From the inside, incoherence is less about one glaring contradiction and more about a steady accumulation of small ones.

Strategy meetings talk about focus; the project portfolio keeps expanding. Values emphasize collaboration; budgeting and promotion cycles reward internal competition. Leaders say they want initiative; the people who take it get quietly punished when things go sideways. Everyone is told to prioritize outcomes; most of the calendar is filled with work that reports on the work.

The effect is not always dramatic. It is often subtle.

People spend more time translating than executing. They start reading the informal rules more closely than the formal ones. The safest move becomes, “Wait to see what the last person got praised or punished for,” instead of, “Do what the system says is important.”

Customer-facing teams see it first. They become the shock absorbers between the promises the organization makes and what its internal systems can actually deliver. Managers feel it as a background drag: more check-ins, more escalations, more time spent reconciling competing priorities.

Consider a cross-functional project team.

Marketing, operations, finance, and product development all send representatives. Their skip-level leaders each bring their own philosophy. One is steeped in servant leadership and tells the team, “My job is to clear obstacles for you.” Another has just finished Team of Rivals and encourages open friction: “If we’re not debating, we’re not doing this right.” A third has quietly absorbed a more Machiavellian stance after years in the organization and coaches their person to protect their interests first, assuming everyone else will do the same.

In the kickoff, everyone nods along to the same objective. On the surface, there is alignment.

Then the work begins.

Each person interprets their role through the prism of the system they report into. The servant leader’s delegate optimizes for harmony and support. The Team of Rivals delegate pushes for healthy conflict and maximal optionality. The more Machiavellian delegate optimizes for leverage and risk insulation. None of them are acting in bad faith. All of them are following a logic that makes sense from where they sit.

When the team regroups for a status meeting, the confusion is immediate. Work that made perfect sense inside one leader’s frame looks baffling, or even obstructive, to everyone else. Timelines slip. Requirements are restated. New dependencies appear. Rework eats into the schedule.

No one is shocked. The project manager built extra time into the plan because they have learned to assume a certain amount of dysfunction.

On paper, it will be written up as an execution issue, a coordination problem, or a reminder to get alignment earlier next time. In reality, the hidden culprit is simpler: there is no cogent operating system that cuts across those local styles. The project is being run inside a patchwork of personal systems because the organization has not designed a shared one.

Most leaders, faced with that kind of environment, do exactly what these skip-level leaders did. They go looking for better ways to lead…drawing on servant leadership, Team of Rivals, The Prince, and a dozen other frameworks, to build micro-systems that make sense of the larger environment and give their people something steadier to stand on. None of those impulses are irrational. The problem is that, without a shared operating system underneath them, the sum of those local fixes creates more fragmentation, not less.

What happened on that project is not unusual. In an incoherent organization, these individual approaches rarely line up with one another or with the underlying architecture. One part of the organization experiences a leader who absorbs conflict and shields the team. Another experiences a leader who surfaces conflict aggressively in the name of candor. A third experiences a leader who treats politics as a core part of the job. Each local system may feel internally consistent. Taken together, they add another layer of fragmentation on top of an already fractured design.

That is part of how dysfunction gets normalized. People are not only surviving the incoherence; they are building local habits, workarounds, and leadership styles to make it livable. Each move is an attempt to bring order to one corner of the system. Taken together, those moves can stabilize the experience of dysfunction so effectively that the organization stops recognizing it as dysfunction at all.

From a distance, this can look like inconsistency in leadership quality. Up close, it is often a patchwork of personal operating systems layered onto an organization that has not yet done the work of designing a shared one.

The lived experience is not a spectacular failure. It is an ongoing sense that the work is harder to succeed in than it needs to be.

Why this becomes expensive

Incoherence does not just make work frustrating. It makes work expensive.

It burns time in meetings that exist primarily to translate between conflicting expectations. It burns energy as people rehearse conversations in their heads before every decision, trying to anticipate whose priorities they are about to offend. It burns trust as commitments made in one forum are quietly undone in another.

It also burns through exactly the people the organization can least afford to lose.

Those who care most about doing good work notice the contradictions first. They are the ones who feel the tension between what the strategy says, what the metrics reward, and what the customer needs. For a while, they will do the extra translation. Over the long term, they either leave, disengage, or narrow their effort to the parts of the system they can still take seriously.

Research on burnout has been making a similar point for years: chronic exhaustion and disengagement are more tightly linked to workload, control, fairness, and values conflicts than to individual resilience. In other words, when people are wearing down, the most useful question is often not, “Who is less committed?” but, “What conditions keep making competent effort so expensive?”

Seen through that lens, the shortage is not resilience. It is coherence.

The real shortage

When leaders say they have a talent problem, they are often describing something real. There are gaps in skill. There are managers who are not yet ready for the jobs they hold. There are hires that were, in fact, misjudged.

But underneath those specifics, there is usually a more basic shortage.

The organization does not yet have a system that makes it straightforward for good people to do consistently good work. It does not have enough coherence between what it says, what it measures, how it decides, and what it rewards.

That is the shortage this essay is pointing to.

Not a shortage of strong people. A shortage of a system strong people can trust.

Sources are drawn from management research and organizational design literature, including McKinsey on organizational health and Harvard Business Review writing on burnout and workplace design.

Written by Mel Davis, Chief Strategy Officer & Systems Architect, EquitiFy®

If there’s a pattern in here that feels uncomfortably familiar, I’m especially interested in how you’ve seen it show up in your world.

Editor’s note: Every essay in Systems Error will remain free. After the first five, I’ll begin adding a paid layer for readers who want to go further into the application: deeper operating analysis, diagnostic tools, and implementation guidance.

Next in Systems Error: why leaders so often feel split between what the system rewards, what the work requires, and what they know actually matters.