The Anatomy of Coherence

A Systems Theory of Organizational Justice

The Illusion of Discrete Problems

For the majority of my career, I operated under the impression that I was solving different problems than I actually was.

At Shutterstock, I thought I was solving a scaling problem: how to level 350+ engineers across continents without the chaos of arbitrary advancement. At Etsy, I thought I was solving a leadership problem: how to deprogram the authoritarian reflexes I’d inherited from a decade in investment banking. In my recent forensic work on toxic organizations, I thought I was solving a pathology problem: how to diagnose the mechanisms by which healthy systems get captured and corrupted.

I was wrong. These were not different problems at all. They were different expressions of a single, recursive failure mode.

The career ladder that prevents favoritism. The participative culture that prevents autocracy. The commitment to truth that prevents delusion. These are not separate initiatives requiring separate frameworks. They are layers of a single, unified architecture. And when any layer fractures, the others cannot hold.

This is what I’ve come to understand as organizational coherence, not mere logical consistency, but the structural alignment between an organization’s stated values and its operational incentives. When that alignment holds, you have a system capable of self-correction, of processing uncomfortable truths, of distributing power without concentrating it into capture. When it fractures, you get the feedback loops I’ve spent years documenting: the drift that invites design, the design that accelerates drift, until the whole system serves interests it was never meant to serve.

The unified field theory I’m proposing here is this: Justice is not a moral sentiment we layer on top of organizations. Justice is a structural output of a coherent system. And injustice is not merely bad behavior by bad actors, it is an architectural flaw that inevitably invites capture.

Whether we are talking about a performance review cycle or a constitutional amendment, the mechanics are identical. The question is always the same: Does the system’s actual operation match its stated purpose? And if not, who benefits from the delta?

First Principles: What Coherence Actually Means

The word “alignment” has been so thoroughly debased by corporate consultants that it now means almost nothing. Every company claims to be “aligned” on values, strategy, culture. The claim is almost always false, and the fallacy is almost always invisible to the people making it.

Coherence is different. Coherence is not about what an organization says. It is about whether the system’s incentive structures actually produce the outcomes the organization claims to value.

The concept of coherence as structural alignment between stated purpose and operational incentive draws on systems dynamics, particularly Donella Meadows’ insight that “purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.”¹

Consider a company that says it values “innovation” but promotes people based on political alignment with leadership. The stated value is innovation. The operational incentive is compliance. These are incoherent. The system will produce compliance while claiming to produce innovation, and everyone inside will learn to perform “innovation” while optimizing for compliance. The gap between rhetoric and reality becomes the space where pathology breeds.

Or consider an organization that says it values “honest feedback” but systematically punishes people who deliver it (”shooting the messenger”). The stated value is candor. The operational incentive is silence. The system will produce silence while claiming to welcome candor, and the people who actually provide honest feedback will be marked as “not aligned,” “not a team player,” or “lacking executive presence” and managed out. The gap becomes a selection mechanism for sycophancy.

Coherence, then, is the absence of these interstitial ambiguities. It is the state where what the system says and what the system does converge closely enough that people can trust the stated rules. Where the career ladder actually determines advancement. Where the values statement actually describes the culture. Where the feedback mechanisms actually process truth.

This is much harder than it sounds. Every organization drifts toward incoherence because incoherence always serves someone’s interests at the expense of the broader organization. The manager who wants to promote their favorite regardless of qualifications. The executive who wants to suppress bad news. The founder who wants to operate outside the rules they impose on everyone else. Coherence requires constant vigilance against the entropic pull of self-interest.

I’ve come to think of organizational health in terms of three layers of coherence, each dependent on the others:

Structural: Do the codified rules (career ladders, policies, governance mechanisms) apply equally to everyone, including leadership?

Cultural: Do the daily behaviors (hiring, firing, promoting, decision-making) actually follow the codified rules?

Epistemological: Is the system capable of processing truth, even when that truth is uncomfortable for people in power?

These layers form a hierarchy. Structural coherence is necessary but not sufficient for cultural coherence. Cultural coherence is necessary but not sufficient for epistemological coherence. And without all three, the system cannot self-correct. It becomes a machine that produces injustice while claiming to produce fairness, that rewards sycophancy while claiming to reward merit, that enforces silence while claiming to welcome dissent.

Structural Coherence: The Constitution of the Organization

In 2018, I documented the career framework we built at Shutterstock. At the time, it seemed like an abstract, technical exercise in HR mechanics, defining levels, clarifying expectations, creating parallel tracks for individual contributors and managers. Looking back, I understand it differently. We were, in fact, drafting an organizational constitution; the kernel underpinning the organizational contract.

The insight that drove this work was simple but consequential. In the absence of defined levels and clear expectations, advancement is determined by proximity to nodes of organizational power. The manager’s favorite gets promoted. The founder’s friend gets the role. The person who happens to be visible at the right moment gets the battlefield promotion. In all scenarios, regardless (and oft, in spite) of qualification. This isn’t corruption in the dramatic, deliberately malicious sense. It’s the default state. Ambiguity is the medium through which arbitrary power operates.

By codifying expectations, by articulating what distinguishes a Senior Engineer from a Staff Engineer, what behaviors and impact are expected at each level, we constrained that capriciousness. We created a system where advancement could be evaluated against criteria that existed independent of any individual manager’s preferences. The ladder wasn’t just a taxonomy, it was a structural (and public) limit on the exercise of arbitrary authority.

This is what I mean by structural coherence; the codified rules apply equally, and they apply to leadership as well. The moment the rules become discretionary for some people, the structure has already failed. The “inner circle problem” I wrote about in toxic organizations is precisely this failure. In the absence of effective structural guardrails, certain people operate outside the rules that bind everyone else, and that exception becomes the vector through which capture enters.

I encountered the inverse of structural coherence when I arrived at Shutterstock and discovered that internal transfers required the full external hiring gauntlet. Engineers with years of demonstrated performance had to whiteboard algorithms to move between teams. The implicit message: your documented track record means nothing. Trust is not portable. Every team is a separate fiefdom with its own arcane credentialing system.

This was structural incoherence. The organization claimed to value its people but had built systems that treated them as perpetual strangers. The fix required creating a single, calibrated standard, a shared currency for assessment that made every team’s judgment portable across the organization. Not bureaucracy for its own sake, but structure that encoded the principle that if you’ve already proven yourself, you don’t have to prove yourself again.

The failure mode of structural incoherence is what I’ve called the ”battlefield promotion,” advancement that bypasses the rules because someone panicked, or because someone’s favorite needed a role, or because leadership found the process inconvenient. Each instance seems inconsequential. A single exception. But the pattern reveals the system’s actual values of stability over integrity, convenience over fairness, relationships over merit.

Then, the cascade: once people see that the rules are discretionary, they stop trusting or adhering to the rules. They optimize for relationship to power instead of performance. They learn that the real game isn’t the stated game. The cultural layer begins to fracture because the structural layer has already cracked.

Cultural Coherence: The Operating System

Structure is the constitution/kernel. Culture is the operating system that runs on top of it. And the operating system can be corrupted even when the kernel is sound.

For a decade in investment banking, I installed an operating system that was brutally simple. Decisions flow down, compliance flows up, fear is the primary management tool. This wasn’t some rogue manager’s pathology. It was institutional design. Public humiliation for mistakes. No concept of one-on-ones as coaching. Professional development meaning compliance training. The model worked, in the sense that it enforced compliance. It destroyed everything else: psychological safety, genuine collaboration, the capacity for dissent.

When I left banking, started my own company, and then joined Etsy, I thought I’d shed that mindset. I was wrong. I’d just taken off the suit. The operating system was still running. A few weeks into Etsy, I designed a new team process and sent it out via email. Top-down, efficient, done.

My manager pulled me aside: “Did you run this by the team before you sent it?”

The implicit feedback was simple: that approach doesn’t work here. Involving people in decisions that affect them isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s foundational.

This was the beginning of what I’ve called ”the deprogramming,” the slow, difficult process of replacing an authoritarian operating system with a participative one. The shift from “managing resources” to “leading people.” It took years. Old habits surfaced constantly under pressure. But the results of the change were tangible and powerful: teams were stronger, more resilient, more adaptable to ambiguity, more capable of solving complex problems. Not because I got smarter, but because I stopped treating leadership as the exercise of authority and started treating it as the cultivation of conditions for others to thrive.

Cultural coherence is this alignment between the stated operating model and the actual daily behaviors. An organization can have a beautiful structure (clear levels, defined expectations, fair policies) and still operate through fear, favoritism, and suppression of dissent. The structure exists on paper. The culture ignores it in practice.

The failure mode I’ve documented most extensively is what I call “yes-men culture,” the systematic capture of an organization’s cultural layer by sycophancy. It doesn’t happen through explicit coercion. It happens through small invitations that feel like recognition. Inclusion in the inner circle. Early access to information. The establishment of dependency, a tight coupling, on proximity to power.

I watched a VP of Engineering transform over six months from a technically competent, strategically sharp leader into an enabler. Not through corruption or coercion. Through a series of small accommodations that seemed reasonable in isolation. A technical concern downplayed. A discriminatory comment met with silence. A pattern of incompetence in the inner circle ignored. By month six, she was actively defending decisions she privately acknowledged were indefensible.

The mechanism is simple. When speaking up costs everything and compliance costs nearly nothing (by comparison), rational people comply. The organizational architecture had made enablement the only viable strategy for survival. The system didn’t break her through force. It shaped her through incentives so carefully calibrated that resistance felt irrational and, more insidiously, self-destructive.

The cascade once again: once cultural coherence fractures, the epistemological layer cannot hold. The VP stopped being able to distinguish between good technical arguments and politically convenient ones. Her first thought when someone raised a concern wasn’t “is this valid?” but “how does this affect the CEO’s timeline?” The capacity to process truth had been subordinated to the imperative of alignment.

Epistemological Coherence: The Shared Reality

Structure and culture are the kernel and the operating system. But there is a third layer I only fully recognized in recent years, the epistemological layer. The system’s relationship to truth.

You cannot have organizational justice if you cannot agree on what is true. And some organizations, by design or by drift, become incapable of processing truth.

I documented one such organization in Red Flags in Tech Leadership. The pathology wasn’t incompetence or politics in any ordinary sense. It was something more fundamental—leadership operating under the genuine belief that laws were discretionary, that observable reality was negotiable, that facts inconvenient to their mercurial preferences simply didn’t apply.

When you tell someone that something violates federal law and their response is to argue about whether the law is really relevant to their specific situation, not as legal strategy but as genuine belief, you’re dealing with someone operating under assumptions you didn’t know were possible in professional contexts. The epistemological layer has collapsed. The system cannot process truth because leadership has exempted itself from the requirement to acknowledge reality.

This creates a specific cascade. In healthy organizations, failures generate information which can then be leveraged to perform post-mortems, identify root causes, fix systems. In epistemologically incoherent organizations, failures generate scapegoats. The goal isn’t learning, it’s protection. Leadership cannot be wrong, so someone else must be responsible. This makes honest feedback impossible. The moment you identify a problem accurately, you’ve marked yourself as the problem.

I watched it happen in a single meeting. An engineer presented data showing a product launch would miss compliance requirements by a significant margin. The CEO’s response wasn’t to engage the data, it was to publicly question the engineer’s “negativity” and ask why she was “always finding problems.” By the end of the meeting, the conversation had shifted entirely from “how do we address this compliance gap” to “how do we manage this engineer’s attitude.” The data never got discussed again. The product launched. The compliance issue materialized exactly as predicted. The engineer was gone within three months, officially for “performance,” actually for being right.

The same dynamic operates through captured HR functions. In every organization I’d worked at before, HR had at least tried to mediate between employee welfare and business interests. In epistemologically collapsed organizations, HR becomes intelligence. Anything you report will be used to build a case against you, not to address your concerns. The mechanisms that should constrain bad behavior have been captured to enable it.

The failure mode of epistemological incoherence is terminal. A system that cannot process truth cannot self-correct. It can only continue operating on increasingly false premises until reality forces a correction through catastrophic failure. It becomes controlled flight into terrain.

The Unified Field: How the Layers Interact

These three layers (structural, cultural, epistemological) are not independent. They form a recursive system where each layer depends on and enables the others.

Structural coherence makes cultural coherence possible. When the rules are clear and apply equally, people can trust the stated game. They don’t have to optimize for relationship over performance. They can focus on the work because the system protects them from arbitrary authority. Remove structural coherence, and cultural capture becomes inevitable; people learn that the real game isn’t the stated game, and they adjust accordingly.

Cultural coherence makes epistemological coherence possible. When dissent is valued rather than punished, when participative decision-making is the norm rather than theater, people can tell the truth. They can name problems without becoming targets. They can provide honest feedback because the culture protects them from retaliation. Remove cultural coherence, and epistemological collapse follows. People learn that truth is dangerous, and they adjust accordingly.

Epistemological coherence makes structural coherence possible. Wait—isn’t this circular? Yes. That’s the point. When the system can process truth, it can identify structural failures and fix them. It can recognize when the rules aren’t being applied equally and correct course. It can see the battlefield promotions and the inner circle exceptions and name them as problems rather than rationalizing them as necessities. Remove epistemological coherence, and structural drift accelerates. The system can no longer see its own decay.

This recursive dependency explains why partial fixes fail. You cannot repair cultural coherence while structural incoherence persists; the incentives will keep producing sycophancy. You cannot repair epistemological coherence while cultural incoherence persists; the punishment for truth-telling will keep producing silence. You cannot repair structural coherence while epistemological incoherence persists; the system is blind to what needs fixing.

This is the “good leader in bad architecture” problem I’ve encountered repeatedly. You can be principled, competent, committed to doing things right, and the system will either corrupt or expel you. Individual virtue is insufficient against systemic pathology. The architecture is stronger than the person.

The mechanism I’ve called the “Drift-Design Feedback Loop” operates across all three layers. It starts with drift—the gradual erosion of norms, the tolerance of small exceptions, the accumulation of ambiguity. This drift creates vulnerabilities. Then comes design—bad actors spot those vulnerabilities and exploit them systematically. They weaponize ambiguity. They capture the mechanisms of accountability. They replace the operating system of merit with one of fealty. The design accelerates the drift, and the drift enables more design, until the system has been transformed into something unrecognizable from its stated purpose.

I’ve watched this happen at the organizational level. I’ve watched it happen at larger scales too, though I’ll leave that observation without elaboration.

The Normative Foundation: An Ethics of Coherence

Every analytical framework embeds normative commitments, whether acknowledged or not. I should make mine explicit.

The ethics underlying this framework rest on three principles:

Participative meritocracy. Decisions should be made with people rather than to them. Advancement should be based on defined criteria applied consistently, not on proximity to power or political alignment. This doesn’t mean democracy in every decision (sometimes speed requires unilateral action) but it means the default is inclusion, and exclusion requires justification.

Empirical grounding. Systems must be capable of processing uncomfortable truth. Not just tolerating dissent as a safety valve, but actively seeking disconfirming information. The “Tenth Man Rule” from Israeli intelligence, where one person is assigned to argue against consensus no matter how strong, is a structural instantiation of this principle. Truth must have standing even when it threatens power.

Distributed accountability. Authority must be coupled to consequence. When decisions fail, the people who made them must face accountability, not the people who warned against them. The inversion of this principle, where objectors get blamed for failures they predicted (”shooting the messenger”), is the signature of captured systems.

These principles are not neutral. They privilege certain values (fairness, truth, distributed power) over others (efficiency, loyalty, concentrated authority). Organizations that reject these principles can still be coherent in the technical sense; their stated values and operational incentives can align. A dictatorship can be coherent. A cult can be coherent.

But they cannot be just.

Justice, as I’m using the term, requires coherence in service of these principles. It requires systems where merit can survive bias, where truth can survive power, where accountability flows to authority rather than away from it.

This is why I say justice is architectural. It’s not about good intentions or reliance on the virtue of individuals. It’s about building systems where the structural, cultural, and epistemological layers align in ways that make fairness the default, deterministic output rather than a lucky accident.

Conclusion: The Architect’s Obligation

I’ve spent my career building systems (career ladders, hiring processes, cultural frameworks) without fully understanding what I was building. I thought I was solving operational problems. I was actually constructing the conditions under which justice could or could not emerge.

Every organization is a system that processes inputs (people, decisions, information) and produces outputs (products, culture, outcomes for the humans inside it). The question is always whether the system produces what it claims to produce. Or does it produce something else while maintaining the fiction of its stated purpose?

Coherent systems produce justice as a structural output. Not because the people inside them are virtuous, but because the architecture makes fairness the path of least resistance. Incoherent systems produce injustice as a structural output. Not because the people inside them are villains, but because the architecture makes capture the rational response to incentives.

This insight scales. The same dynamics that govern a 50-person startup govern (much) larger systems. The mechanisms of drift and design, the recursive dependencies between structural and cultural and epistemological layers, the feedback loops that accelerate collapse, none of this changes with scale. Only the stakes.

I have children now. The systems I build, the frameworks I document, the patterns I diagnose, these are no longer abstract professional concerns. They are the inheritance I leave. Either we build systems capable of self-correction, capable of processing truth, capable of distributing power without concentrating it into capture, or we leave our children systems that will consume them.

Structure is not the enemy of freedom. In a world of entropy and bad actors, structure is the only thing that guarantees it. The architect’s obligation is to build systems where coherence is maintained, where justice is architectural, where the gap between stated values and operational incentives is small enough that people can trust the rules.

That’s the work. It’s the same work whether you’re designing a career ladder or something larger. The anatomy of coherence doesn’t change. Only the scale of consequence.

1. Meadows, Donella. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.