Coherence, Fragmentation and Split Coherence
How human systems organise, get disconnected and restore particpation.
Coherence: A trustworthy word
Coherence is a word that has been spoken highly of throughout fields and bodies of work. Not just that, the word itself inculcates a feeling of trust and safety. Whatever it is, it feels worth having more of — for ourselves, our teams, or our institutions.
However, our understanding of coherence widely varies. It’s familiar: something we sense the shape of without understanding precisely. Whether or not one understands it, coherence is present in some respects, absent in others, often letting us function well enough that we rarely stop to look.
However, looking more closely and developing a clearer understanding across contects can help us use it and develop it consciously.
Coherence and related constructs has been taken up across many literatures — psychology, physiology, neuroscience, narrative theory, systems science, organisational research — and each has developed its own account. Its patterned breakdown has been described just as variously, and just as separately. The accounts are largely compatible. They have rarely been placed side by side.
Spiral Pattern Intelligence is partly an attempt to do that: to hold these understandings in relation rather than choose between them, and to be specific about what the words are doing.
coherence (noun)
a. systematic or logical connection or consistency
The essay as a whole lacks coherence.
b. integration of diverse elements, relationships, or values
“The various parts of this house—discrete in color, in shape, in placement—join together with remarkable coherence.” — Paul Goldberger
Merriam-Webster
It's not sameness
As we think of coherence, we possibly like to think of it as sameness or calm that leads to complete alignment or harmony. In other words, if it’s not completely harmonious all the time, it’s not coherence. This becomes a common misreading it.
However, coherence is not sameness, as Paul Goldberger has quoted. The different parts and aspects of something may stay discrete, different in colour, shape and placement — and yet they connect. It is connection holding across their differences.
Which means coherence does not mean continuous harmony, alignment, calm, or things going well. A difficult conversation where two people stay in contact while disagreeing is coherent. A meeting where everyone agrees quickly and nothing real is said is often not.
Coherence can be uncomfortable. Holding two things that don’t reconcile, does not feel good and yet agrees to stay in an ongoing dialouge is a coherent state.
Fragmentation: A breakdown of Coherence
fragment (verb)
to fall to pieces; to break up or apart into fragments
Merriam-Webster
Fragmentation is the loss of that connection. The parts remain — they don’t disappear, and often they keep working — but they stop answering each other. Goldberger’s house fragmented is not a house with more colours in it. It is a house where the colours have stopped speaking.
This is why fragmentation is so often missed. Falling to pieces suggests visible collapse. In human systems it is usually quieter than that: everything still standing, everything still functioning, the connection between the parts gone.
Complete coherence and complete fragmentation are both idealisations. Nothing living reaches either. Everything actual sits somewhere between, and moves.
Fragmentation travels
It does not stay where it starts.
How a leader holds pressure shapes decisions, tone and priorities. Those shape how safety and responsibility are experienced across a team. Over time, patterns of disconnection settle into structures, processes and culture — just as connected ways of functioning strengthen relation across levels.
People are not separate from systems. They are shaped by them and they participate in shaping them. Fragmentation and coherence are not only personal states. They are systemic patterns that travel.
Split Coherence©
Somewhere in that space between sits something specific enough to name.
Split Coherence describes a system that is patterned, stabilised and genuinely functioning — while being split.
A person meets every responsibility, performs a demanding role well, and carries a disconnection they may not have words for. An institution delivers, sustains and grows while its stated values and its lived reality drift steadily apart. Nothing is failing. That is precisely what makes it hard to see.
This is not a mask with the truth underneath. The competence is real. The disconnection is real. Both are fully inhabited at the same time, and neither is the deeper one. That distinction matters, because the moment the functioning is read as performance, the person is being told that the most solid thing about their life is a lie. It isn’t.
Split Coherence is not a midpoint on a scale — not “moderately coherent.” It is a zone with its own structure, its own stability, and its own logic.
What looks perfect, and what looks broken
There are recognisable ways this splits.
Some systems hold together beautifully on the outside while something inside has gone quiet. They meet every marker of success and cannot say what is wrong, because by every available measure nothing is.
Others look less coherent from outside — less linear, less legible, harder to place against a template — and carry depth and range the smooth version does not have. Many people described as neurodivergent live here. So do many people who have moved through a great deal. Spiralling comes naturally to them; they have done it before and know the movement, even when the world reads that movement as instability.
Neither is the healthy one. What looks perfect often isn’t, and what looks imperfect often holds capacities the perfect-looking version cannot reach.
The work is not to convert one into the other. It is to see what is actually there, and work with it.
Why fragmented systems produce solutions that fight each other
Here is what fragmentation does that makes it more than a description.
When parts of a system are no longer relating, each one solves for itself. It has to — it can only see its own portion.
A leader optimises delivery, because delivery is what they are accountable for. A team protects itself, because it has learned what happens when it doesn’t. A person manages their symptoms, because the symptoms are what they can reach.
Every one of those responses is locally sensible. Together they work against each other.
That is why effort rises while movement doesn’t. Nobody is failing. Everybody is solving. The solutions are cancelling.
How integrative solutions emerge
Seeing the pattern is not an aesthetic pleasure or a diagnostic exercise. It changes what solutions are available.
When the parts become visible in relation, a different kind of move appears — one that accounts for the relation rather than optimising a part. It is not a harder version of the same solution. It is a different solution, and it usually asks less force rather than more.
This is why the work often looks like stillness early on. Very little is being pushed. A pattern that has held for years does not shift because someone tried harder, and the first useful movement is often a reduction in effort rather than an increase.
What follows is not a better mood. It is a system that costs less to run, and that can attempt more than it could before.
Working with fragmentation, not eliminating it
Modern life places simultaneous demands: productivity and care, stability and change, individual need and collective responsibility. Under those conditions, some degree of fragmentation is not a failure. It is a consequence of complexity.
The question is not how to eliminate fragmentation. It is how to work with it consciously.
Growth is usually imagined as steady movement from problem to solution. Lived experience rarely obliges. It moves in cycles — clarity and confusion, stability and disruption, progress and return — and the return is not a relapse. It is how the movement works.
Where this comes from
Coherence, fragmentation and Split Coherence are constructs within Spiral Pattern Intelligence© — a framework for how complex human systems organise, fragment, reorganise and develop.
Split Coherence is the subject of research currently under scholarly processes.
In practice
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