From Coherence to Impact: What resources are for, and why I went underneath my own why

Earlier this summer I wrote about the Four S framework: Signal, State, Structure, Support. Most of that series was about what happens when the sequence runs out of order. Structure ahead of Signal produces process theater, an organization that is highly organized and poorly oriented. State without Signal produces serene drift, a calm leader heading somewhere they shouldn’t. Applied to a room, the same sequence becomes collective resonance.

That series answered how coherence fails.

This piece answers the question underneath it, the one I have been circling for years without saying out loud.

What is coherence for?

The why I stopped noticing

For a long time I have described my why in one line: connecting resources to impact.

I knew what it meant before I knew all the forms it would take, and for most of my career I could point at exactly how it showed up in the work. People to people. Capital to ideas. Ideas to the rooms where they could be funded. Founders to the relationships, perspectives and structures that could hold what they were trying to build. I have always been a connector and that was the recognizable shape of it, wrapped up into a single phrase.

Then somewhere in the last few years, as the work moved into leadership, embodiment, organizational systems and what I now call coherence across complexity, I noticed I had stopped saying it. And I found myself wondering where it had gone.

It hadn’t gone anywhere.

I had gone underneath it.

I spent those years building the floor that phrase had been standing on the whole time. Connecting resources to impact is still the why. Coherence is what makes the connection hold.

What a resource actually is

When I first used that phrase, I was thinking about the obvious resources. Capital. Relationships. Networks. Access. Information. Real ones, and important.

My understanding has expanded considerably since then. An organization’s resources are not the money on its balance sheet. They are its people and its institutional memory. Its technology, its data, its intellectual property. Its distribution, its brand, its reputation, its customers, its partnerships. Its creativity. Its appetite for risk and its capacity to actually execute. Its time. And underneath all of it, the attention of the small number of people who decide where the rest of it goes.

Look at an organization that way and something becomes plain very quickly. Having more of these is a different thing from doing more with them. Scale does not automatically produce meaning. What matters is how those resources move. Where they move, why, who decided, and what the decision was ultimately in service of.

That is where coherence enters.

Where the leakage happens

An incoherent organization still functions. This is the part that makes the problem so hard to see from inside it. A dysregulated leader still makes decisions. A fragmented executive team still executes. An incoherent company can grow, and it can make a great deal of money doing it.

What it cannot do is stop spending energy on the gap.

Decisions get made and remade or a series of mergers and acquisitions leads to a mish mash of disjointed operations. Teams move in directions that quietly compete. People optimize for their function because the whole is too unclear to optimize for. And then the compensations start, each of them reasonable on its own. More structure gets added to compensate for missing clarity. More process gets added to compensate for missing trust. More meetings get added to compensate for missing alignment. More data gets requested because nobody feels confident enough to decide. Activity gets mistaken for progress, and the mistake is very hard to catch because activity looks exactly like progress from the outside.

The resources are all there. They are simply not moving coherently.

Incoherence rarely announces itself as failure. It shows up as expense. It costs attention, time, creativity, opportunity, and eventually good people. Then it costs the thing the resources were gathered for in the first place.

Why the body work is business work

I came to embodiment through a question about perception.

I kept running into the same wall from the same direction. Under the strategy problem was a structure problem. Under the structure problem was a decision problem. Under the decision problem was a perception problem: someone could not tell, in the moment it mattered, which of ten promising things was the real one.

The quality of what we build is shaped by the state we build it from. That is a claim about accuracy.

Body as technology means treating physiology as an instrument rather than a wellness accessory. What can a leader perceive when they are not operating from reactivity? What becomes available when the unknown is not being treated as a threat that must be immediately controlled? What information is already present in the room, in the market, in the numbers, that nobody can hear because there is too much noise in the receiver?

Coherence as a leadership idea is older than my use of it. Alan Watkins was writing about leadership physiology under that name in 2013. My contribution is narrower and more operational: the sequence, the four failure modes that come from running the sequence out of order, and the question of what the whole thing is in service of.

The sequence is where people get confused, so let me be exact. Signal comes first because it is the question that ranks all the others: what is true here, as opposed to what is merely urgent. State comes second because state determines whether you can hear the answer. In practice the two are recursive. You need enough state to perceive signal, and you need signal to know what your state is in service of. Run either one without the other and the series has already named what happens.

From there the chain is fairly plain. State gives access to signal. Signal supports discernment. Discernment produces clearer choices. Clear choices produce coherent action. And coherent action is what changes how resources move.

That movement is where the impact begins. These stopped being separate bodies of work to me some time ago. They are layers of one system.

Money is a resource too

I want to say something plainly here, because it can sometimes become strange in conversations about impact.

Money matters. Capital, revenue, profit, economic value creation. All of it matters, and I have no interest in the artificial divide between making money and making a difference. Money is what lets a company employ people, fund research, take a risk, build infrastructure, enter a market, reinvest. It gives people choices. Directed with intention, it amplifies enormously.

I have had money and I have lost money. I know what resources make possible and what happens when they disappear. Having less does not make anyone more virtuous, and I do not romanticize either condition.

Many of the organizations I work with would never be categorized as impact businesses, and they don’t need to be. An entertainment company touches enormous numbers of lives through stories and shared experience. An agriculture business supports livelihoods, families, suppliers and local economies well beyond its own walls. A technology initiative inside either one may look on the surface like a pure efficiency play. But businesses are systems. Capability creates growth, growth creates revenue, revenue creates the capacity to invest again, and if those resources continue to be directed well, the cycle compounds.

Revenue is an amplifier. What it amplifies is a separate question, and it is the more interesting one.

The responsibility of coherence

Coherence does not make a thing good.

This is the part I want to be careful about, because it would be convenient to skip. A coherent organization can become extraordinarily effective at pursuing something that creates very little value. Coherence is an efficiency of intention. It makes whatever you are actually in service of arrive faster and with less loss along the way.

Which means the more capable we become of translating intention into action, the more the intention itself matters. The more resources under your direction, the more consequential the choice. The more influence, the more weight in what you point it at.

This is why I care about working with leaders specifically. Leadership is stewardship of resources, sometimes enormous ones. A CEO is stewarding capital, people, attention, relationships and trust. An executive team is determining how an entire system moves. A founder is shaping something that may outlast them by decades. When those people can hear signal, discern what matters and act coherently from it, their capacity to direct what is available toward something genuinely valuable goes up dramatically.

Something that solves a real problem. Creates a livelihood. Gives people access. Expands what an organization believes is possible. Work worth the resources it consumed.

Leverage

I have also gotten clearer about the scale at which I want to do this.

I am interested in transformation at points where transformation compounds. Sometimes that point is one person, a founder or a CEO whose internal clarity ripples through everything downstream of them. Sometimes it is an executive team, a small group around a table determining where thousands of people’s attention and enormous amounts of capital and technological capability will be pointed for the next several years. Sometimes it is the organizational system itself.

This is why enterprise and executive-level consulting continues to make sense to me. Working near the top of an organization is working close to the place where resources actually move. Where priorities get set, capital gets allocated, innovation gets funded or quietly abandoned, and decisions begin that eventually reach communities and industries.

Leverage matters when your why is impact. A relatively small shift at the right point in a system changes how enormous resources travel, and those resources reach lives I will never personally see.

What AI does to all of this

Everything I have just described has been repriced in the last two years.

My thesis on this has been consistent: AI amplifies. It takes whatever state you bring to it and makes more of it. In the context of resource allocation, that has a specific and uncomfortable meaning.

Every compensation I named earlier is now nearly free to produce. More analysis, more documentation, more process, more decks, more dashboards, more options to consider. The organization that was adding structure to compensate for missing clarity can now generate that structure faster than anyone can read it. The team that requested more data because nobody felt confident enough to decide can now request infinite data and feel exactly as unconfident, on a much shorter cycle.

AI does not decide what resources are for. It inherits the allocation logic already running in the system and executes it at volume, fluently, with excellent formatting.

For most of the modern history of organizations, the binding constraint was capacity. Capacity is getting cheap. The binding constraint now is discernment, and discernment does not scale by procurement. You cannot license it, and the vendor cannot install it.

So the cost of incoherence has changed shape. It used to be slow leakage you could absorb for years. It is now high-velocity misallocation, produced by a system that has never performed better.

What are your resources in service of?

The question I keep coming back to is no longer whether an organization has enough resources. Many of the ones I encounter already have extraordinary ones.

The more useful questions are harder. Where is your attention actually going? Where are your best people spending their time? What are you protecting? What are you afraid to stop doing? Which opportunity keeps appearing at the edge of the organization that nobody has made enough space to properly see? Where is friction telling you something rather than costing you something? Where has process replaced clarity? Where has scale moved faster than coherence?

These are questions of value, of leadership, and finally of resource allocation. Organizations are concentrations of human, financial, intellectual and creative capacity. At scale they are among the most powerful mechanisms we have for turning an idea into something that exists in the world. The only remaining question is what we choose to build with them.

Legacy is simply what exists because you were here. What became possible because you funded the idea, created the job, changed direction when the old direction stopped making sense, or made enough space to hear what deserved your resources before you committed them.

Coming back up

There is something satisfying about returning to words you have used for years and finding they mean more than they did when you first said them.

I needed to understand the human system underneath the organizational one. I needed to understand state, signal, embodiment, coherence, complexity, and what happens to a structure built without enough foundation beneath it. I suspect I needed to live some of that before I could see it clearly in other people’s companies.

Now the whole chain is visible to me. Signal tells you what is true. State determines whether you can hear it. Structure gives the answer a container. Support keeps the container from leaking. And on the other side of all four, resources begin to move with intention instead of momentum, which is the only condition under which they reliably produce anything worth having.

Connecting resources to impact was always the why.

Coherence is how the connection holds.

The question, for anyone entrusted with resources, whether that means billions of dollars and thousands of employees or a small team and your own attention, comes out the same way. What becomes possible if you get coherent enough to put what you have in service of what actually matters?

This piece is part of an ongoing series on the Four S framework: Signal, State, Structure, Support. I teach this work live with founders, executive teams and enterprise leaders navigating AI-era acceleration. If your organization has extraordinary resources and you want to talk about where they are actually going, start here.