I want to start by giving you a word, because I could not quite find the one I needed and had to make it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We say a system “coheres,” as if holding together were something it manages on its own, almost by luck. What the agentic era demands is far more deliberate. When execution gets cheap and anyone can build, automate, and deploy in an afternoon, speed stops being an edge, because everyone has it. What becomes scarce is coherence: getting a growing crowd of autonomous systems, and the people accountable for them, to pull in the same direction. And getting them there is active work. Someone has to do it. That work deserves its own verb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So: to coherise. It means to achieve coherence on purpose, to take a set of parts that could easily pull apart and make them hold together as one. You can coherise a team, a workflow, a company filling up with agents. You can also fail to coherise it, which is where most organizations are heading right now without seeing it, because the failure does not show up anywhere a dashboard would catch. When execution gets cheap and everyone can go fast, the scarce skill becomes the ability to coherise everything you have built.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am convinced this is the job the agentic era is quietly creating, the one that decides who wins it, and it does not have a name yet. So I gave it one, and named this newsletter after it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each edition I will round up what went on the blog, so you have one place to catch anything you missed. If you are new, here is the whole arc so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two posts lay the foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Introducing Coherence.<\/strong><\/a> Why I wrote the book, told as a story. It runs from a question I have chased since college, how billions of neurons become one mind, to the problem every leader now faces: how a company holds together as it fills with autonomous systems. Weigh in on LinkedIn…<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Intelligence Is Becoming Cheap. Coherence Is Not.<\/strong><\/a> The core argument in one place. It opens with a baseball story from early in my career and lands on the idea I keep returning to, complexity debt: the hidden cost that builds as automation piles up and nobody is coordinating it. Weigh in on LinkedIn…<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Three from the past week take the idea into things happening right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The AI Jobs Debate is Not Asking the Right Question.<\/strong><\/a> Everyone is arguing over whether AI takes jobs. I think that argument misses the larger shift. When execution gets cheap, the scarce thing becomes coordination, and the Meta layoffs, read closely, are a coordination story wearing a labor headline. Weigh in on LinkedIn…<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n McKinsey Is Right About the Moat. Here’s the Half It Misses.<\/strong><\/a> McKinsey argues that your real AI advantage is your operating model, the one thing a competitor cannot copy. They are right. The half they skip is that the redesign they prescribe is also the fastest way to manufacture a new, invisible coordination problem, and getting it wrong widens the very gap they set out to close. Weigh in on LinkedIn…<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Your AI Usage Exhaust Is Someone Else’s Moat.<\/strong><\/a> Satya Nadella and two researchers, Arvind Narayanan and Akash Kapur, described the same trap from opposite ends within days of each other. Every time your people correct an AI, they encode your institution’s judgment into it, and that judgment leaks to whoever owns the model. The post works out where the leak costs you most, and where you can let it go. Weigh in on LinkedIn…<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n That is edition one. From here it lands weekly: a short round-up of what I wrote, plus the occasional thing that caught my attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the book is why you are here, it is called Coherence: The Competitive Advantage AI Can’t Buy<\/em><\/a>, out this Fall. Everyone who joins the list at coherise.com<\/a> gets the one-page decision tool I use to sort what to automate, what to augment, and what to keep in human hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if you try to coherise something this week, tell me about it. Those stories are where a good share of my ideas come from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Newsletter – Edition 1 I want to start by giving you a word, because I could not quite find the one I needed and had to make it. We say a system “coheres,” as if holding together were something it manages on its own, almost by luck. What the agentic era demands is far more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":108,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsletter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions\/186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Before you go<\/h3>\n\n\n\n