Producing Coherence: A Process Theory of Organizational Integration Under Continuous Perturbation

Coherence is not a property organizations possess. It is work they perform continuously through a recurring process of surfacing what distributed actors are experiencing, bringing those interpretations into genuine contact, and working toward shared understanding. When that work is overwhelmed, coherence degrades, not because anyone failed, but because the work of making it exceeded the capacity to do it. We propose a process theory of organizational coherence under continuous perturbation. The integrative cycle is the mechanism through which distributed interpretations become shared meaning, producing three things at full depth: coordination sufficient for action, organizational learning that updates shared frameworks, and emergent collective intelligence. Organizational Metabolization Capacity (OMC) determines whether the cycle can be sustained at the required depth. Three regimes follow: adaptive coherence, constrained coherence, and perceptual collapse, with collective intelligence lost first, learning second, coordination last. The theory identifies pre-decisional breakdown as the condition preceding failures organizations misdiagnose as strategy, leadership, or communication failures. A triple lock of structural, cultural, and behavioral mechanisms makes it self-sustaining, invisible, and undiscussable simultaneously. Seven falsifiable propositions and seven illustrative cases formalize and ground the theory. The broader claim: organizations are meaning-producing systems whose capacity for genuine collective action depends on continuous production of shared understanding from distributed human experience, and specifying that process changes not just how failure is diagnosed but what organizations are understood to be. Keywords: organizational coherence, integrative cycle, organizational metabolization capacity, OMC, distributed interpretation, oscillatory interaction, pre-decisional breakdown, constrained coherence, perceptual collapse, collective intelligence, organizational learning, double-loop learning, organizational culture, psychological safety, triple lock, meaning-producing systems, process theory, organizational failure, systems thinking