Strategic Coherence
The degree to which the different elements of a business strategy — arenas, vehicles, differentiators, staging, and economic logic — reinforce rather than contradict one another.
Strategic coherence describes how well the individual pieces of a strategy fit together as a system. A strategy is coherent when its arenas, vehicles, differentiators, staging, and economic logic are mutually reinforcing — each choice makes the others more likely to succeed.
Incoherence is common and often invisible from inside a company, because each individual decision can look reasonable in isolation. A pricing decision, a hiring plan, and a market-entry choice can each be defensible on their own while working against each other in combination.
Coherence is distinct from strategic quality. A company can have a coherent but weak strategy (all pieces align, but around a poor idea), or a strong but incoherent one (individually excellent choices that undermine each other). The strongest strategies are both ambitious and internally consistent — this is the specific gap the Strategy Coherence Index is designed to surface.
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