Why your best strategic thinking is designed to miss what matters most. A trade-length treatment of the framework for senior leaders, directors, and advisors. Target publisher: HBR Press.
The Coherence Trap is the practitioner entry point to the framework. It translates fifteen years of research in behavioral strategy and managerial cognition into a vocabulary that senior leaders can actually use, grounded in case material drawn from strategic decisions across industries and decades.
The central argument is that strategic conviction is not evidence of accuracy. Conviction arises when the mind has assembled a coherent interpretation; coherence is necessary for action but is also what produces the most dangerous form of strategic failure, in which confident decisions turn out to have been made from a selective and valenced picture of the situation.
Most books on decision-making are about how to think better. This book is about how to notice what you are noticing, and how to notice what you are not. It is not a debiasing manual. It is a guide to the moment when choosing feels like finding, and what to do when you recognise that feeling.
"the most dangerous moment in a strategic decision is when choosing feels like finding"
Seventeen chapters. Approximately 127,000 words. Undergoing final revision ahead of proposal to HBR Press. Expected publication: late 2026 or early 2027.
Board chairs, chief executives, chief strategy officers, investment committee leaders, senior advisors. Readable by general executive audiences but written for those whose decisions carry real stakes.
The book opens with the composite case that introduces the framework: a strategic decision shown from two perspectives simultaneously, revealing how the same information produces two internally coherent but incompatible readings. The middle chapters develop the theoretical architecture — orientation, attention, interpretation, valenced mental models, affective coherence, and the coherence trap itself. The later chapters apply the framework to specific contexts: the boardroom, the investment committee, strategic pivots, organisational change, succession, and the governance of judgment itself.
A closing afterword addresses the rise of AI in strategic decision-making and argues that human judgment remains structurally irreplaceable in the decisions that matter most: those in which the trade-offs are incommensurable and the choice cannot be made by computation alone.