Coherence Without Control: Rethinking Sensemaking and Leadership in Educational Organizations

This article was originally published on LinkedIn on November 7, 2025.

Colleges and universities are not machines to be managed; they are systems of people who learn—individually, collectively, and organizationally. They include departments, classrooms, residence halls, advising centers, and offices—each interpreting purpose and practice through its own lens. In such environments, coherence cannot be engineered through compliance. It must be cultivated through reflection, dialogue, and shared purpose.

An academic success center measures success differently than a residence hall, yet each interprets learning and development as part of its mission. Their purposes diverge, but their meanings converge—each contributes to a system that learns.

This essay draws on the Integrative Frame for Formation (IFF), a model for human, educational, and organizational development. The IFF suggests that learning, flourishing, and leading are interdependent capacities that sustain coherence through reflection rather than control. What follows interprets how that formation unfolds at multiple levels—how individuals learn, how organizations adapt, and how leadership becomes a form of interpretation.

Educational Organizations as Learning Ecologies

Educational organizations function as learning ecologies—systems that adapt through feedback, reflection, and belonging. Loose coupling allows for local autonomy while shared purpose maintains connection. In these settings, coherence develops through communication, interpretation, and trust.

During cross-divisional retention meetings, each office contributes its own interpretation of student experience. Coherence emerges when those perspectives identify an area of convergence with the institutional mission. In that moment, reflection becomes infrastructure, and conversation becomes capacity.

The ability to learn together—to turn information into meaning—defines institutional vitality. Learning deepens when reflection becomes inquiry and inquiry leads to collective understanding (Argyris & Schön, 1996).

Educational development reflects this dynamic ecology. Through faculty learning communities, communities of practice, curriculum consultation, and instructional design, faculty and staff link reflection to action. Development becomes the practice of coherence—the way a community learns how to learn.

During a campus visit, I learned about how engineering and writing faculty discovered a shared language for learning and application. That small bridge became a model for interdisciplinary teaching and a reminder that coherence often begins in conversation.

Sensemaking as Collective Learning

Sensemaking converts complexity into shared understanding. It begins with attention rather than certainty and treats ambiguity as an opportunity to interpret. When an institution faces financial strain, curriculum change, or cultural tension, leadership becomes a collective act of discernment.

Take dining operations as an example. Dining services are often seen as the delivery of food. Cross-unit discussions on wants, needs, and aspirations revealed something more substantive. Every operational decision is also a sensemaking exercise—intentionality can shift a dining program from transactional service to a source of community.

A colleague posited, “a sense of coherence often develops most strongly in cultures that have less cushion for comfort.” The comment resonated with me. Coherence does not depend on sophistication, privilege, or stability. It emerges when people interpret experience together—often within constraint. Reflection becomes a shared practice that helps communities preserve integrity through the sensemaking process.

Through evidence and reflection, an organization transforms data into dialogue and dialogue into design. When assessment becomes a conversation and feedback becomes a formative experience, learning shifts from information to insight. Institutions that sustain reflection as a daily practice tend to evolve without losing their integrity. They treat feedback as a form of formation—a dialogue between what is measured and what is meaningful (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2015).

Leadership of this kind is developmental. It connects the human capacity for reflection with the institutional capacity for learning, building coherence not by directing change but by interpreting it with others. Sensemaking becomes the ongoing process through which coherence is renewed.

Educational Development and Organizational Formation

Educational development connects individual learning to organizational formation. It helps a college or university function as a teaching and learning community by turning reflection into design and purpose into practice. Through consultation, course design, and faculty leadership, coherence takes form.

When teams connect inquiry with design and evidence with meaning, the institution itself participates in formation. Leadership and learning are not separate processes; they are expressions of the same developmental motion. Coherence emerges when shared reflection turns into collective design.

I have seen this in mid-semester course consultations when a faculty member recognizes that student confusion stems less from content than from context—how the learning environment communicates what the institution values. That moment of recognition is educational development at work: feedback transforming into formation.

Educational development illustrates how individual reflection scales into collective insight; it connects the personal work of formation with the institutional work of learning. It depends on trust, curiosity, and reciprocity—the same qualities that sustain institutional integrity. Faculty and staff who engage this work translate values into visible practice: classrooms that invite belonging, meetings that begin with reflection, and feedback processes that emphasize growth over compliance (Felten et al., 2007; POD Network, 2016).

Enactment and Integrity

Coherence is demonstrated through practice, not policy. It appears in everyday operations—a department meeting that begins with reflection, a curriculum review that connects decisions to mission, a discussion of assessment data that seeks understanding before judgment. Each instance of shared attention strengthens alignment between purpose and behavior.

At the end of each term, the residence life staff team reflects—not to evaluate performance, but to interpret what the semester taught it about itself and its community. Those conversations shape the culture more than any formal policy change.

When individuals practice reflection within their roles and the institution responds in kind, coherence becomes reciprocal—each shaping and being shaped by the other. An organization becomes what it practices. When feedback is received as learning rather than criticism, integrity grows. Through consistent reflection and adaptation, the routines of teaching, service, and leadership gain ethical depth. Coherence is integrity practiced over time; integrity is coherence made visible.

Small Wins and the Architecture of Coherence

Institutional change develops through small, developmental wins—specific, observable actions that express alignment in motion.

• A cross-functional team reads data together.

• A conversation reframes the student experience.

• A course redesign clarifies purpose.

Each act links local insight to collective learning and turns improvement into formation.

These incremental efforts create the architecture of coherence. They translate mission into daily practice and embed learning into the organization’s memory. Small wins accumulate into institutional knowledge, helping a college or university learn from its own experiences (Schuh & Rhatigan, 2003).

Why Coherence Matters

Students, faculty, and staff experience the university as one environment even when its structures are divided. Their growth depends on whether academic, social, and administrative systems reinforce or compete with one another. Coherence is not uniformity but integrity across difference—the alignment of values, relationships, and design.

Students do not experience “departments” or “divisions.” They experience a single campus narrative. Every interaction either reinforces or fractures that story.

When reflection becomes a shared practice, coherence becomes a cultural norm. Leadership becomes sensemaking. Institutions become communities that learn—not because they are commanded to, but because they have cultivated the capacity to listen.

To practice coherence is to recognize that education and leadership are the same work: turning complexity into understanding, reflection into renewal, and purpose into shared life.

Author’s Note. This essay integrates human, educational, and organizational development to examine how coherence forms through sensemaking and leadership. Drawing from the Integrative Frame for Formation, it considers how reflection, feedback, and belonging sustain integrity across difference. Leadership, in this view, is not control but interpretation—the daily practice of coherence in motion. Special thanks go out to Amanda Funk Ed.D.; her comment on sense of coherence resonated with me.

References

• Antonovsky, A. (1979). Health, Stress, and Coping. Jossey-Bass.

• Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1996). Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method, and Practice.

• Addison-Wesley. Felten, P., Kalish, A., Pingree, A., & Plank, K. (2007). Toward a scholarship of teaching and learning in educational development. To Improve the Academy, 25, 93–108.

• POD Network Executive Committee. (2016). What is Educational Development? https://podnetwork.org/about/what-is-educational-development/

• Sanford, N. (1966). Self and Society: Social Change and Individual Development. Transaction Publishers.

• Schuh, J. H., & Rhatigan, J. J. (2003). Small wins and the use of assessment data. NASPA Journal, 40(2), 208–216.

• Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday.

• Weick, K. E. (1976). Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(1), 1–19.

• Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2015). Managing the Unexpected (3rd ed.). Wiley.

© 2025 Joshua J. Mitchell. All rights reserved.