Cohesive Delivery

In the intricate tapestry of organisational life we often find ourselves grappling with how to keep things moving and ensure everyone is pulling in roughly the same direction. The common language we hear is about alignment and consensus, yet these concepts often paper over the cracks, creating an illusion of togetherness that can actually hinder true progress. There is another way though, a more pragmatic path, which focuses on cohesion.

Let us unpick these three.

Alignment. We often hear leaders calling for everyone to "align" around a strategy or a goal. This sounds sensible on the surface. We need to be aligned to a common purpose, after all. But alignment begs a crucial question: what exactly are we aligning around? Is it a detailed plan handed down from on high? Is it a problem statement that has been polished to within an inch of its life? The danger here is that alignment can become a passive exercise, a tick box affair where people nod along without truly buying into the underlying purpose or adapting it to their local reality. It can lead to an organisation that looks neat on paper but struggles with the messy reality of delivery, where people are simply following instructions rather than engaging their full intelligence and creativity.

Consensus. This often feels like the democratic choice, where everyone must agree before moving forward. It aims for harmony, which is lovely in theory, but in practice, it can lead to the blandest idea winning the day, or people agreeing publicly while privately disengaging. Imagine a team stuck in a never ending meeting, trying to get everyone to sign off on a decision. The outcome is often a watered down compromise that nobody is truly enthusiastic about, leading to a kind of collective paralysis. Consensus, while well intentioned, can flatten dissent and avoid the very friction that often sparks innovative solutions. It smooths over genuine tensions without ever truly resolving them.

Cohesion. This is a different beast altogether, far more powerful in a complex world. Cohesion is not about everyone thinking the same way or using the exact same tools. It is about a shared ability to move forward together, even with differing views, anchored by a common purpose. It is about commitment in the face of diversity, honouring those differences rather than trying to erase them. Think of it as a well oiled rowing crew: each rower has their own style, their own rhythm, but they are all committed to propelling the boat in the same direction. They are in co-motion. This concept is deeply rooted in pragmatism, where truth is not absolute but discovered through experience, and knowledge is relational, shaped through inquiry and context. Cohesion requires a mindset of continuous inquiry, staying with the uncomfortable conversations, and moving through experimentation rather than rigid decrees.

The decision of what to align around, whether it is a goal or a problem, should not be simply handed down or achieved through mere consensus. Instead, it emerges through a process of cohesion where inquiry, shared sensemaking, and practical experimentation illuminate the path forward. This brings us to the very heart of how we sustain delivery and shared direction without falling into the trap of premature alignment or managed consensus. It is a constant oscillation between involvement and detachment, moving from messy reality to structured inquiry, and back again.

The Cohesive Delivery constellation, with "how do we sustain delivery and shared direction without defaulting to premature alignment or managed consensus?" at its core, beautifully illustrates this dynamic process. It is a living map, not a static plan, of how we navigate the inherent complexity of organisational life through a series of interconnected omnipatterns.

Here is how this constellation works, focusing on each cluster in turn.

At the centre, we are wrestling with that fundamental tension: how do we keep things moving and ensure everyone is heading in a coherent direction, without stifling our ability to learn and adapt? This is where the pragmatic heart of omnicomplexity beats. The diagram outlines a continuous, iterative flow, rather than a linear process. It suggests that sensemaking and action are deeply intertwined, feeding into each other in a continuous dance.

Explore Evolving Tensions

This cluster is all about capturing daily moments of friction, apprehension, or satisfaction on an empirical basis. These entries are then shared asynchronously among the team and gathered into the collective pool for refinement. This initial stage is crucial for sensing the subtle signals of a system's health and potential areas of concern.

• 1-Minute Journal. This pattern captures daily moments of friction, apprehension, or satisfaction on an empirical basis. It is about gathering those raw fragments of lived experience, the narratives that are held without judgement. These are the whispers and shouts from the front lines, the immediate feedback that tells us what is actually happening. It is a personal act of presence, a commitment to noticing the small things that often signal larger patterns.

• Tension Sorting Circle. This pattern extends the 1-Minute Journal by reading those journal entries aloud, sorting them by emotional energy and naming tensions using evocative language. As narratives cluster or repeat, we begin to notice observations, and these can then reveal tensions when they conflict with values or desired outcomes. This is a structured dialogue that helps us make sense of these emerging tensions. It is about naming what is difficult, exploring competing logics, and understanding the emotional and systemic significance of these conflicts. This isn't about resolving them immediately, but about bringing them into the light so we can work with them.

• Probe Storming. This pattern reframes questions and generates diverse types of probes, such as inquiries and existential ones. The purpose here is to move from themes to inquiries by shaping generative questions that guide what we choose to explore, not to find the right answer but to deepen understanding. These probes are small, safe to fail experiments designed to act within the system and observe the consequences. It is an application of abduction, forming the best available hypothesis in uncertainty, treating each probe as a hypothesis in formation rather than a commitment to deliver.

Align around Purpose and Repattern how we Work

This cluster focuses on bringing purposeful interaction and rhythmic activities to notice emergent shifts, issues, and patterns as they emerge. It is a dynamic process of adjusting beliefs, values, and actions to create coherence, keeping the loop warm with living inquiry.

• Strategic Beta Canvas. This pattern helps us decide what we want to do and how we evolve how we do it. This pattern supports the emergence of valuation, which is seen as emergent, contextual, and relational. The canvas helps us frame what is causing friction or harm, what might improve the situation, and importantly, who benefits and who bears the cost of action or inaction. It is about making explicit the ethical and relational consequences of our choices.

• Learning Rhythm Map. This pattern extends Strategic Beta Canvas by capturing lessons from current learning cadences based on tensions and probes, moving into feedback loops and recovery plans. As we run our probes, we are actively tracking the consequences. This map helps us revisit our understanding of tensions and probes based on the feedback we receive. It is a retrospective view, allowing us to learn from our actions and adjust our course. This is an application of John Dewey's inquiry loop: experience leads to doubt, which leads to inquiry, action, consequences, and then renewed experience.

• Story Weaving. This pattern extends Strategic Beta Canvas by populating the canvas with narrative artefacts that enact the tension and help us test it in the real world. This is about creating a shared understanding of what is happening, allowing diverse perspectives to contribute to a richer, more nuanced picture.

• Working Agreement Repatterning. This pattern revisits how we work and the progress we are making on focusing tensions and probes. This allows us to change our habits of response and expectation, shifting from an espoused theory to a theory in use. It is about noticing and evolving the small, repeated actions that make up a collective way of being.

Sense and Adapt in Real Time

This cluster is about applying adaptive responses to evolving temporal and contextual dynamics, embracing the idea that knowledge emerges through doing. It focuses on navigating uncertainty by offering guidance without prescription.

• Pulseboard Check-Ins. This pattern provides a light touch, daily check-in that captures not just how to act, but how to think, learn, and grow through practice. It is a way to monitor emergent patterns and treat strategy as evolving through coherent feedback.

• Learning Rhythm Map. This pattern extends Pulseboard Check-Ins. At the end of a check-in, the team decides when to check-in next, thus using the Learning Rhythm Map to schedule future reviews and learning cycles. This allows for continuous adaptation based on emerging needs and insights.

Participative Inquiry

This cluster is about fostering humility, pluralism, and shared understanding across differing perspectives. It aims to connect ideas in a way that is natural and progressive, bringing personality and wit into the style. It emphasises that knowledge is co-created and meaning arises in interaction, not isolation.

• Relational Terrain Mapping. This pattern helps to understand and orient ourselves within the environment, identifying stakeholders, systems, and their interrelationships, as well as perceived tensions, politics, and power dynamics. This can be done either before a session to review existing work, during a session, or both. It helps to surface these often unsaid dynamics, allowing teams to create shared language without blame.

• Strategic Constellation Gallery. This pattern forms the core of the review process in participative inquiry. The constellations are placed in a gallery, allowing stakeholders to walk through them, review them, and comment on them. It is a way to explore big, conceptual ideas and visual models, using visual storytelling with diagrams and imagery, akin to books like Business Model Generation. It invites teams to imagine different ways of framing difficult situations, encouraging generative curiosity over reactive problem solving. It is a space for creative abduction, leaping to plausible hypotheses that can then be tested through probes.

• Reflective Relay. This pattern is essential for the Strategic Constellation Gallery to function effectively. Here, members of the community of inquiry, including stakeholders and team members, actively critique the constellations and the findings or insights derived from them. This helps to keep the loop warm with living inquiry, fostering ongoing dialogue and adaptation rather than allowing practices to cool into mere procedural performance.

Resolve Deeper Tensions in Practice

This cluster is dedicated to creating a space to replicate and work through tensions that cut across different roles, values, or perspectives. It helps to make explicit the challenges that arise when insights or observations clash with our values, purpose, or desired outcomes. It acknowledges the messy reality of organisational life and opts for pragmatic solutions over idealistic ones.

• Disposition Mapping. This pattern helps to map values, beliefs, and roles around each tension. It aims to reveal the emotional, political, and philosophical logic behind positions. This process reveals the gap between espoused belief and habitual behaviour. It is a way to understand what we truly believe by examining what we actually do.

• Tension Inversion. This pattern invites teams to imagine what might make things worse to expose buried contradictions. It is an example of an oblique technique, like TRIZ, that asks the group to actively design failure. By asking "what would we do if we wanted to completely destroy trust?", people often tell the truth more easily when pretending to joke, sidestepping defensiveness and inviting reflection through satire. This allows for a deeper understanding of underlying tensions without direct confrontation.

• Team Coherence Reflection. This pattern is used before or during the session to review the team's progress and how they are relating to the stakeholder ecosystem. This invites teams to hold the emotional and social ambiguity of asking questions without immediate answers. This fosters a healthier ecosystem of collaboration, where people can contribute according to what the moment calls for, not just their job title. It is about enabling adaptation through feedback loops, leading to continuous learning, adjustment, and improvement.

This interconnected flow of practices demonstrates how we can sustain delivery and shared direction. It moves beyond the illusion of alignment and consensus to embrace a more robust and responsive cohesion, built on continuous inquiry, shared sensemaking, and practical experimentation. It is a pragmatic way of working that is grounded in the messy reality, alive to plural perspectives, and adaptive to the evolving needs of people, teams, and organisations.