Chief Coherence Officer

A client sent me a speaking brief with six topics on it, and asked for all six in one session.

• Trust as a performance lever
• An HR posture aligned with transformation
• What it means to be an HR business partner today
• Acting as a strategic partner to managers
• Contributing to decisions and value creation
• Adapting practices to the evolution of work

My first thought was that this read less like a conference plan and more like a gastronomic menu. Six dishes, each excellent, each ordered from a different kitchen, and the host wants all of them on the same table at the same time. The chef’s job is to find the through line rather than reheat six plates side by side.

The link between HR and management has been discussed for decades and is obvious to everyone in the room. What is not obvious is the link between the six subjects themselves. It took me a while to see it, and once I did, the whole brief collapsed into a single word.

All six are about coherence. And the case I want to make in this article is that the chief coherence officer is the role the People function has been performing without a name, without a budget line and without a measurement system. I want to give it all three, starting with an idea that will annoy people: coherence behaves like a finite budget that every organisation spends, whether or not anyone is counting.

The scattered brief	The single ingredient	The frame that prices it
Six subjects, one questionTrust, posture, role clarity, partnership, value creation and adaptation are usually treated as six separate agendas. Read together, each one describes a gap between what an organisation states and what it does. The chief coherence officer is the role that closes those gaps.	Coherence is the scarce resourceOrganisations are rarely short of strategy, tools or intent, and they are consistently short of alignment between the three. The People function holds the only dataset that records how the organisation actually behaves, as distinct from how it describes itself.	A budget, then a registerCoherence behaves like a finite budget that every decision spends, which makes an incoherence a purchase rather than a failure. Tracking those purchases requires a register of the promises an organisation has made, each with an owner, an audience and a date it was last honoured.

The six dishes and the single ingredient

Six briefing topics resolve into three pairs, and each pair describes the same gap from a different distance. Trust and posture describe the gap between what leaders say and what they approve. Role and partnership describe the gap between a title and the work behind it. Value and adaptation describe the gap between what is claimed and what is rewarded.

Trust and posture: the gap between the statement and the approval

Trust is the speed at which decisions circulate inside an organisation. Low trust means three validations, two meetings and a legal review. High trust means one person says yes and the thing happens. Every organisation has a trust velocity, and most people can feel it within a fortnight of joining.

That velocity is set by consistency over time rather than by any statement about values. A People leader who champions wellbeing on Monday and signs off an impossible deadline on Tuesday has taught the organisation more about its real priorities than any policy document will.

Posture works the same way one level up. The function that agrees with every strategic proposal is absent rather than aligned. Useful friction, applied early and in public, is what makes an approval mean something, because an approval that was never at risk carries no information.

Role and partnership: the gap between the title and the work

Two of the six topics ask what an HR business partner is today and how to partner strategically with managers. Both questions have the same answer, and it is short. Partnership implies the right to disagree, so a function that cannot refuse a bad idea is a supplier with a better job title.

I have treated the question of what replaces the partner posture at length elsewhere, and I will not repeat it here. The short version is that the move runs from business partner to business contributor, and the verdict on whether you have made it belongs to the people you serve rather than to your own assessment.

What matters for this article is narrower. Both topics describe an incoherence between a name and a reality, and naming that incoherence is the first act of the role I want to describe.

Value and adaptation: the gap between the claim and the reward

The last two topics ask how the People function contributes to value creation and how it adapts practices to the evolution of work. Both are usually answered by addition, with a new program, a new platform or a new framework. The more interesting answer is subtraction.

The best People decisions of the past decade were removals: a bad hire caught in week three, a manager who was destroying a team moved out of the role, and a performance review system retired rather than improved. Nobody receives an award for subtraction, which is exactly why so little of it happens.

Adaptation carries the same trap. Adapting is always reactive, and by the time practices have caught up to a new reality, the reality has moved. Designing what the next version of work looks like inside your own organisation is a different activity, and it is the one that produces an advantage rather than a recovery.

Six topics, three gaps, one ingredient. The rest of this article is about naming that ingredient properly, pricing it, and building the instrument that tracks it.

What a chief coherence officer is

A chief coherence officer is the executive accountable for the distance between what an organisation says, what it does and what its people experience. The role owns no process of its own. It owns the gaps between processes, which is precisely where most organisational damage is manufactured and where no existing function has a mandate.

The title already exists, in two other disciplines

I did not coin this title and I want to be precise about who did what. Two communities arrived at it before me, from directions that have nothing to do with the People function, and their versions are worth knowing because they show what the term does well.

The healthcare strategy community proposed it first, for brand. The Forum for Healthcare Strategists argued that a health system needs someone who can orchestrate every touchpoint so that living the brand becomes an organisational imperative rather than a marketing initiative. That version is about consistency of experience across a fragmented delivery system.

Higher education arrived at almost the same word independently. The Society for College and University Planning has made the case for a chief coherency officer heading an integrated institutional effectiveness function, on the argument that loosely coupled systems can afford to be uncoordinated in stable times and cannot afford it when the environment turns hyperactive.

Dave Lutkenhaus has made the case more recently from the angle of strategic integration, arguing that the fragmentation of corporate functions itself creates the need for a role whose job is putting the pieces back into one picture. Three sources, three disciplines, one intuition. None of them is about people.

What the People version of a chief coherence officer adds

The People version of the chief coherence officer role differs from the brand and institutional versions in what it measures. Brand coherence is measured in touchpoints. Institutional coherence is measured in coordination. People coherence is measured in the behaviour of humans, which is the only version that detects the gap before it becomes public.

That distinction matters operationally. A brand audit will tell you the website and the recruitment ad say the same thing. Only the People data will tell you that the candidate who read both left the process at stage three, and that the reason appears three times in exit interviews from the same department.

My contribution to the term is therefore narrow and specific. I am not proposing a new C-suite appointment. I am arguing that this work is already being done badly, by nobody in particular, and that the People function is the only candidate with both the data and the access to do it properly.

Why the People function is the only structural candidate

Every function sees part of the organisation, and each part is genuine. Finance sees the money, strategy writes the narrative, and operations runs the machine. The People function is the only one that sees the distance between the narrative and the machine, recorded in what people do rather than in what the organisation reports about itself.

The dataset already exists and is usually treated as administrative exhaust. Four sources carry most of the signal.

• Absence patterns broken down by team and by manager rather than reported as an organisational average.
• Exit interview themes tracked across several years rather than summarised once a year.
• The rate at which strong performers leave, set against the rate at which weak performers are promoted.
• Offer acceptance rates, and more revealing still, the proportion of accepted offers that never turn into a first day.

None of these are reporting metrics. They are the live feedback loop of a system that should be adjusting every month, and most organisations read them once a year in a slide pack. The chief coherence officer is the person who reads them as signals rather than as a compliance duty.

The access matters as much as the data. Naming an incoherence requires standing close enough to the decision to see it being made and far enough from the outcome to have no stake in defending it. The People function occupies that position by construction, which is a structural advantage the profession has spent thirty years apologising for rather than using.

This is also where the HR Design method earns its place. HR Design is my human-centred, iterative, collaborative and prototype-driven approach to the People function, built on treating candidates, colleagues and alumni as the organisation’s most demanding clients. Coherence is never solved once, so it needs a method that loops rather than a program that concludes.

Coherence behaves like a budget rather than a virtue

Every organisation holds a finite amount of coherence, and every decision either spends some or leaves it intact. Treating coherence as a virtue makes it a matter of character, which puts it beyond management. Treating it as a budget makes it a matter of allocation, which is a conversation an executive team already knows how to have.

The coherence budget, and why it is finite

The coherence budget is the amount of contradiction an organisation can carry before people stop believing what it says. It is finite because belief is finite. Each unexplained gap between a statement and an action draws down the credit that makes the next statement land, and the drawdown compounds because people remember patterns rather than incidents.

The budget is also unevenly distributed. A newly appointed leader arrives with a full account and can spend heavily in the first quarter. A leader who has already broken two visible commitments is operating on credit and will find that a third announcement produces no behaviour change at all, regardless of how well it is written.

Teams hold separate accounts. This is why an organisation can run a genuinely coherent engineering function alongside a sales function nobody believes, and why an engagement average across both tells you nothing useful. Coherence is held locally and spent locally, and it only aggregates upward when the contradiction comes from the top.

Bought incoherence and spent incoherence

Some incoherence is worth buying. An organisation that publicly states it values flexibility and then requires four days on site for a specific team has created a contradiction, and that contradiction can be entirely defensible if the trade-off was made deliberately and explained honestly. The purchase was priced, and everyone can see what was bought.

Spent incoherence is different. It occurs when nobody noticed a contradiction was being created, nobody priced it, and the cost lands two quarters later in attrition, in recruitment difficulty or in a quiet refusal to volunteer for anything. The organisation paid full price for something it never chose to buy.

The distinction gives the People function a much better question than the one it usually asks. Asking whether the organisation is coherent invites a defensive answer and a scorecard. Asking which incoherences the organisation has chosen to finance this year, and at what price, invites an executive conversation about allocation.

There is a risk in this framing and I want to name it rather than hide it. Giving leaders a vocabulary for justifying contradiction can license the contradiction. The frame only works if the pricing happens before the decision, in writing, with the cost estimated. A coherence budget invoked after the fact is an excuse with better grammar.

What it costs to spend without pricing

Unpriced incoherence shows up in the numbers long before it shows up in a conversation. It arrives as recruitment that takes longer for no visible reason, as a widening gap between what leaders believe about the culture and what teams report, and as capable people who stop putting their hand up for anything discretionary. Each of those symptoms describes capability that stays on the payroll and stops reaching the output, which is the leak I examine in how much of your talent density reaches the work.

The manager layer absorbs the cost first. Gallup’s global research shows manager engagement falling from 31 per cent in 2022 to 22 per cent in 2025, while engagement among individual contributors moved barely at all over the same period, from 20 to 19 per cent. Managers are the population that has to deliver the contradiction in person, which is why they pay for it first.

The Australian picture adds a second pressure. The same research records job market optimism across Australia and New Zealand falling twelve points in a single year, moving the region out of the top position it held globally between 2022 and 2024. A workforce with fewer exit options does not become more tolerant of contradiction. It becomes quieter about it, which removes the early warning.

What coherence collapse actually looks like

Three recent cases show the same mechanism at three different scales. In each one, an organisation stated a reason, produced an outcome that contradicted the reason, and then made a third move that contradicted the first two. The People function held data that would have priced the contradiction in advance, and in each case nobody was asked for it.

Amazon, and the reason that contradicted the result

In September 2024, Amazon announced that its corporate workforce would return to the office five days a week from the start of the following year. The stated reason was strengthening culture. The mechanism by which a mandate strengthens a culture was never explained, and that omission is the entire story.

Reasonable people disagree about office policy, and the policy itself is not the failure. The failure is a stated reason that the action cannot deliver. A culture is the accumulated experience of how decisions get made, so a decision imposed without consultation teaches the organisation something about its culture that no amount of subsequent communication can revise.

Priced properly, this was a purchase. The company could have said it wanted physical presence for reasons of control, speed or property utilisation, estimated the attrition it would cost, and accepted the bill. That version spends coherence deliberately. The version that invokes culture spends it twice, once on the mandate and once on the explanation nobody believed.

Klarna, and the number that was heard differently from how it was said

In February 2024, Klarna published a claim that became the most quoted sentence in enterprise artificial intelligence for the following year. Its assistant, built with OpenAI, was handling two thirds of the company’s customer service chats and doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents, with a projected profit improvement of forty million United States dollars.

Read carefully, the claim describes an equivalence calculation rather than a redundancy. Nobody said 700 people had been dismissed. Read as the world read it, the sentence said exactly that, and it was reproduced under headlines about 700 workers replaced for the next eighteen months.

That distance between what was said and what was heard is an incoherence the company created and then benefited from, which is the most expensive kind. It bought a reputation for decisiveness with investors and paid for it with every candidate and colleague who now read the company as one that measures people in units of avoided headcount.

The third move completed the pattern. By 2025 the company had publicly acknowledged that the automation drive had gone too far on service quality and had resumed recruiting people so customers could always reach one. Three positions in eighteen months, each contradicting the last, each addressed to a different audience.

Boeing, and the value that outlived its practice

On 5 January 2024, a door plug separated from an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 shortly after take-off. Nobody was killed. The investigation that followed reads as a coherence post-mortem conducted at national scale, and it is the case I would keep on the desk of anyone who thinks this subject is soft.

The National Transportation Safety Board concluded in June 2025 that the probable cause was the manufacturer’s failure to provide adequate training, guidance and oversight to its factory workers, and that its voluntary safety management system did not proactively identify and mitigate risk. A stated safety culture had been running alongside an operational practice that contradicted it, for years.

Every system that should have detected the divergence sat inside the People function, including whistleblower processes, escalation paths, protections against retaliation and exit interview patterns from the plants. The signal was present in the data and absent from the boardroom, which is a reporting failure rather than a detection failure.

The lesson generalises well below aerospace. A gap between a stated value and the operational reality of that value is never safe to leave open, because the accumulation is invisible until the moment it is not. Culture atrophy does not announce itself, and then something falls off a plane.

The promise register

Culture is too large a unit to manage and too vague to audit. The promise is the right unit. An organisation makes a finite number of explicit promises, each with an owner, an audience and a date it was last honoured, and a register of those promises turns coherence from a mood into a maintained asset.

The promise as the unit of analysis

A promise is any explicit commitment the organisation has made to a named audience about how it will behave. It differs from a value in being falsifiable. A value cannot be broken because it was never specific enough to test, while a promise either held on a given date or it did not.

Most organisations carry between twenty and forty of them, and almost none can list them. They accumulate from recruitment advertising, induction decks, town hall statements, policy documents, manager scripts, award submissions and the careers page. Each was made by someone, to someone, at a moment, and then left unattended.

Switching the unit of analysis from culture to promise changes what the People function can do. Culture invites an annual survey and a narrative. Promises invite a register, an owner per line and a review date, which is the difference between describing a problem and holding a control.

What a register contains

Six columns are enough. The promise in the words it was actually made in, the audience it was made to, the person who now owns it, the evidence that it currently holds, the date it was last honoured visibly, and the estimated cost of the gap if it is not holding. The last column is the one that turns the register into a management document.

Wording matters more than it looks. A promise recorded in summary drifts toward whatever the organisation is comfortable delivering, and within two cycles the register is measuring the paraphrase rather than the commitment. Record the sentence as it was published, with the source, and let it be inconvenient.

• Every promise has one named owner, never a function and never a committee.
• Every promise names its audience, because a commitment to candidates is a different asset from the same words said to existing colleagues.
• Every promise carries a date of last visible honouring, and an undated line is treated as broken until evidence arrives.
• Every promise that is not holding carries either a repair plan or a written decision to keep spending on it.
• Any promise the organisation is unwilling to own is retired publicly rather than left standing.

That last rule does most of the work. Retiring a promise out loud costs far less coherence than leaving it visible and unmet, because a withdrawal is a single event while an unmet promise is a repeated one.

The decay rate of a promise

Promises decay. A commitment honoured visibly last month is an asset, the same commitment last honoured two years ago is a liability, and nothing in between is neutral. The register makes the decay legible by forcing a date onto every line, which is the single change that converts a values statement into an instrument. A skills record is measured the same way, because skills become a currency only when people trust them, and that trust rests on whether a recorded skill has visibly led somewhere.

Decay rates differ by audience. A promise made to candidates decays fastest, because each cohort tests it within weeks and compares notes publicly. A promise made to long-tenured colleagues decays slowly and fails catastrophically, because it is tested rarely and carries years of accumulated expectation when it finally is.

I should name the cost of this method as clearly as its benefit. A register of thirty promises is real administrative work, and it is exactly the kind of maintained artefact an overloaded function abandons in the second quarter. Start with the five promises that appear in your recruitment material, because those are tested most often and repaired most cheaply.

When the law prices the gap for you

Regulation is becoming the fastest mechanism for forcing coherence, and Australia is further ahead than most markets. Publishing employer-level pay data removes the option of telling one story internally while running a different system underneath, because the number and the story become visible in the same view on the same day.

What employer-level publication actually does

The Workplace Gender Equality Agency is the Australian statutory body that collects workforce data from employers with 100 or more staff. It first published individual employer gender pay gaps in February 2024, and has since expanded the release, most recently combining private and Commonwealth public sector employers in a single publication covering around 8,500 employers and 1,600 corporate groups.

The effect on behaviour has been measurable rather than theoretical. WGEA reports that 54.8 per cent of employers reduced their average total remuneration gender pay gap year on year, and that the mid-point of employer gaps fell by 0.9 percentage points over twelve months. Publication changed conduct in a way that a decade of internal policy had not.

One figure inside that improvement deserves a great deal more attention than it receives. While the overall gap narrowed, the gender pay gap at chief executive level moved the other way, rising 1.2 percentage points to 26.2 per cent. Organisations improved where the measurement was granular and public, and moved backwards at the level where it was neither.

The employer statement is the coherence test

Alongside each published gap, employers may supply an employer statement giving context for their number. That mechanism is the closest thing Australia has to a public coherence audit, because it places the organisation’s account of itself immediately next to the measured reality, permanently, for anyone to compare.

Read a few of them and the pattern becomes obvious within minutes. Statements that describe specific actions with dates read as credible whatever the number says. Statements that explain the number away read as an admission, and they are read that way by candidates, by journalists and by the organisation’s own staff.

This is the promise register made compulsory in one domain. The organisation states a commitment, a regulator publishes the measurement beside it, and the distance between the two becomes a public asset or a public liability. Nobody in the People function should need convincing that the same discipline applied voluntarily elsewhere would be cheaper than waiting for it to arrive.

What this predicts for other domains

Pay is simply the first domain where measurement became public. The pattern is generalisable, and any organisational claim that can be reduced to a comparable number is a candidate for the same treatment, whether it is imposed by regulation, by a customer, by an investor or by an employee who publishes their own count.

The prudent assumption is that every claim currently protected by the absence of a metric will eventually be exposed to one. Working backwards from that assumption produces a very different set of priorities from working forwards from this year’s compliance calendar.

That reasoning also answers the objection I hear most often, which is that this work has no return until something goes wrong. Publication converts a latent liability into a live one on a date the organisation does not control, so the return on early repair is simply the difference between a repair you scheduled and a repair a regulator scheduled for you.

How to choose where to spend your coherence effort

Four approaches are commonly proposed when an organisation decides its stated and lived realities have drifted apart: relaunch the values, retrain the managers, restructure the incentives, or register and price the promises. Each addresses a real cause. Each fails in a predictable way, and the failure modes are what should decide between them.

Four approaches, and what each one repairs

The four differ in what they treat. A values relaunch treats the statement, manager training treats the delivery, and incentive redesign treats the instruction people actually follow. A promise register treats the gap itself, which makes it the only one of the four that produces a standing measurement rather than an event.

A values relaunch is fast, visible and almost always the wrong first move. Rewriting a statement that the organisation is already failing to honour spends coherence rather than restoring it, because the relaunch itself becomes one more promise on the pile. It works only where the statement is genuinely the problem, which is rare.

Manager training is the most commonly bought and the most commonly wasted. It repairs a real gap where managers want to deliver a promise and lack the skill, and it repairs nothing at all where the reward system is instructing them to do the opposite. The field note above describes the second case, and no training budget survives contact with a commission scheme.

Incentive redesign is slow, political and the most effective of the three conventional options, because it changes the instruction rather than the aspiration. Its failure mode is scope. Touching one scheme without touching the recognition, promotion and performance criteria around it moves the contradiction rather than removing it.

The four approaches side by side

The table below sets the four against the criteria that decide between them. Read the failure column first, because most poor choices here come from selecting an approach whose failure mode matches a condition the organisation already has.

Approach	What it repairs	Time to visible effect	How it fails	Choose it when
Values relaunch	A statement that genuinely no longer describes the organisation	One quarter	Becomes one more unmet promise	The words are wrong and the behaviour is right
Manager training	A delivery gap where intent exists and skill does not	Two quarters	Collapses against a reward system pointing the other way	Incentives already support the promise
Incentive redesign	The instruction people actually follow	Nine to twelve months	Moves the contradiction to an adjacent scheme	You can touch recognition and promotion at the same time
Promise register	The gap itself, with an owner and a price per line	Six weeks for the first five promises	Abandoned as administrative work in the second quarter	Nobody can currently list what the organisation has promised

Which signals should decide

Three signals settle the choice more reliably than any diagnostic instrument. Whether anyone can list the organisation’s promises without looking them up, whether the reward system contradicts any of them, and whether an external measurement of one of them is already scheduled by someone other than you.

When nobody can list the promises, start with the register, because every other option is being applied to an unknown target. Six weeks and five promises will change the conversation more than a year of culture work applied in the dark.

When the reward system contradicts a promise, nothing else matters until that is resolved or priced openly. When an external measurement is already coming, work backwards from the publication date and repair what will be visible, because a gap you close before publication costs a fraction of one you explain afterwards.

Where to start in the next six weeks

Six weeks is enough to build the first version of a register and to price one contradiction. It is not enough to fix a culture, and attempting the second instead of the first is how this work usually stalls before anyone sees a result.

The sequence

The order matters more than the pace, and each step below fits inside a normal working week. Collecting the promises before judging any of them prevents the most common error, which is auditing the commitments the function is proud of and quietly skipping the ones it inherited from marketing or from a previous chief executive.

1. Collect the promises. Pull every explicit commitment from the careers page, the recruitment advertising, the induction deck and the last two all-hands presentations, in the exact wording used.
2. Name an owner for each. Where nobody will own a line, mark it and move on, because an unowned promise is already a finding.
3. Date each one. Record when the promise was last honoured in a way somebody outside the function could point to.
4. Read the reward system against the register. Look for any payment, promotion or recognition rule that instructs people to do the opposite of a promise.
5. Price one contradiction. Estimate the cost of the widest gap in recruitment difficulty, attrition or rework, in dollars rather than percentages.
6. Take the priced contradiction to the executive team with two options: repair it, or record a written decision to keep financing it.

Step six is where the method either becomes real or becomes a slide. Presenting a contradiction without a price invites a discussion about tone. Presenting the same contradiction with a number attached invites a decision, and a decision is what you came for.

The check before you present

Naming an incoherence badly turns a systemic finding into a personal accusation, and a room that hears an accusation will defend the person rather than examine the gap. The difference sits almost entirely in preparation rather than in delivery. Run through the following six checks before the meeting.

• The promise is quoted in its published wording, with the source named.
• The evidence of the gap comes from at least two independent sources rather than one anecdote.
• The cost is expressed in a unit the finance function already uses.
• No individual is named, because the finding concerns a rule rather than a person.
• Both options are genuinely available, including the option to keep paying, and you are prepared for that one to be chosen.
• A date is proposed for reviewing the decision, so that keeping the contradiction remains a live choice rather than a settled one. The shift in mindset this requires from the People function is worth reading before the first attempt.

How I can help you close the gaps

Diagnosing an incoherence is straightforward once you know where to look. Getting a leadership team to price one out loud, in front of each other, is a different exercise and it needs a room. I work in two formats, one to give a group a shared diagnostic and one to produce the first register.

The keynote, for rooms that need the diagnosis first

A sixty to ninety minute keynote built on the coherence budget, the three collapse cases and the promise register. Designed for executive committees, People leadership events and management conventions, and adaptable from forty-five minutes to a half day.

The audience leaves with a way of auditing their own organisation, the specific questions to put to their own executive team, and a short list of the promises most likely to be failing in their sector. It works best as an opening session, because it gives the rest of the programme a shared vocabulary.

Available in person, remotely or hybrid, in English or French.

The workshop, for teams building the register

A two day intensive for People teams ready to move from diagnosis to instrument. Day one builds the register, collecting the promises in their published wording, assigning owners and dating each line. Day two prices the widest contradiction and prepares the conversation with the executive team.

Participants use the HR Design toolkit throughout, including candidate journey mapping, employee experience mapping and the DNA check-up. Everyone leaves with one coherence initiative designed collaboratively and ready to test inside thirty days.

Structured for functions of between ten and fifty people, adaptable to smaller and larger groups, in English or French.

How to start the conversation

Write to me through this site or reach me on LinkedIn. I send a short discovery questionnaire first, which asks which promises your organisation makes most often, which of them you suspect are not holding, and what has already been tried.

Those three answers shape the session far more usefully than a briefing call, because they tell me whether the room is ready to hear a price or still needs to hear the diagnosis.

Conclusion

Six subjects arrived on a single brief and turned out to be one subject with six symptoms. Trust, posture, role, partnership, value and adaptation all describe the same distance, measured between what an organisation states and what it does.

Treating that distance as a moral quality leaves it unmanaged. Treating it as a finite budget makes every contradiction a purchase, and the only unforgivable purchase is the one nobody priced. Treating the promise as the unit of account gives the budget a ledger, with an owner, an audience and a date on every line.

The Australian evidence suggests this is arriving whether organisations prepare for it or not. Publication changed employer behaviour on pay in two years, after a decade of internal policy had not, and pay is simply the first claim to have been made public and comparable.

The role has existed for years without a name, a budget line or an instrument. Calling it what it is, the chief coherence officer, is the cheapest possible start, and the register is what makes the title mean something by Friday.

Frequently asked questions about the chief coherence officer