The Coherence Trap
A book by Maurice Violani

The
Coherence
Trap

Why your best strategic thinking is designed to miss what matters most

We select before we decide.

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Cover of The Coherence Trap by Maurice Violani
The idea

Two capable leaders. The same facts. Opposite conclusions, both certain.

Every experienced executive has been in the room. The data are agreed, the analysis is sound, the people are able, and the decision still divides. The usual explanation is bias: one side is weighing the evidence badly.

This book offers a different explanation. The choices that matter most in strategy often have no right answer. Each option is better in a different respect, and nothing in the situation ranks them. On those choices, the deciding happens before the weighing. Something has already settled which signals register and which feel significant, and by the time the discussion starts, each side is reasoning carefully from a picture the other cannot see.

That moment does not feel like a choice. It feels like insight.

“The most dangerous moment in a strategic decision is when choosing feels like finding.”
What the book gives you
01

See which choices are open

A simple way to tell a decision that has a right answer from one that does not, and why the difference changes everything about how it should be made.

02

See what closed them

A vocabulary for the guidance system that decides what you notice, in you, in your team and in your organisation, built on decades of research in strategy and managerial cognition.

03

Keep them open long enough

A small set of practices, centred on the Decision Quality Triangle, for making the hardest choices on purpose rather than by default. Most take minutes.

Inside

Four parts

I

The Architecture

What happens in the fraction of a second before deliberation begins, and why it is not a bias.

II

The Mechanisms

How attention, coherence and experience close a choice, and what they leave out without a trace.

III

The Social Dimension

What happens when differently oriented people decide together, and how organisations come to see the world one way.

IV

Working with the Architecture

Practice for strategists, investors, boards and chief executives, and a chapter on the AI advisers leaders now consult.

The research behind it

The same experiments, run on machines

The book draws on the research programme of the Strategic Reasoning Laboratory. Its first registered results come from seven frontier AI models given choices with no right answer: told whom they serve, they close the choice in that person's direction, and rarely say that it was open. A companion study of experienced professionals on the same choices is designed.

Read the preprint  ·  The research programme

7
frontier AI models
4
registered studies
115,000
model responses
The author

Maurice Violani

Maurice Violani has spent more than twenty years advising chief executives, boards and private capital sponsors on strategic decisions across Australia, Asia, North America and Europe. The question behind this book came from that work: why equally capable leaders, looking at the same information, reach opposite conclusions with equal conviction.

He founded the Strategic Reasoning Laboratory to study it, and his research on bounded interpretation spans behavioural strategy, managerial cognition and the psychology of judgment. He lives in Sydney.

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