CONCEPT
The Coherence Illusion
The AI-era failure mode in which individually polished outputs fail to cohere when assembled — each piece appears internally consistent while missing the genuine coordination that only happens when the pieces are developed together.
The specific coordination failure the AI age makes newly possible — and newly invisible. When every member of a team can operate across domains, each producing AI-assisted outputs independently, those outputs may appear polished and competent in isolation but fail to cohere when assembled. The coherence illusion is dangerous because it is invisible until assembly. Each piece looks good on its own. The integration failure appears only when the pieces must function as a whole, and by that point, retrofitting the coordination that should have occurred at the beginning costs many times more than building it in from the start. Follett's four principles of coordination — direct contact, early engagement, reciprocal adjustment, and continuous process — address the failure structurally.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The coherence illusion is the AI-era manifestation of a pattern Follett identified decades before: coordination is the fundamental activity of organization, more fundamental than planning or controlling. An organization that coordinates