Working Hard But Getting Nowhere: Why Modern Organizations Are Stuck in the MUD

Abstract Most organizations experiencing persistent incoherence are not suffering from a strategy problem, a communication failure, or a leadership deficit. They are suffering from a misdiagnosis. This article argues that organizational coherence is not a state organizations achieve and maintain but a process they perform continuously — and one that can be overwhelmed. When the pace and volume of what an organization faces exceeds its capacity to produce genuine shared understanding from what its distributed people are experiencing, coherence degrades. The condition is self-sustaining, invisible from inside, and made worse by the interventions organizations typically reach for. This article names the condition, describes its three interlocking mechanisms (Meaning overload, Undiscussable dysfunction, and Deepening responses — MUD), and offers three counterintuitive practices for leaders working to restore the conditions for genuine collective thinking. The piece is a practitioner-facing companion to the author's working paper Producing Coherence: A Process Theory of Organizational Integration Under Continuous Perturbation (Morgan Working Paper Series, 2026). Keywords organizational coherence, meaning-making, shared understanding, organizational dysfunction, leadership practice, organizational diagnosis, pre-decisional breakdown, metabolization capacity, alignment failure, practitioner-scholar, organizational behavior, collective intelligence, psychological safety, organizational learning, MUD framework