What is the ECI?
What is execution coherence?
Execution coherence is a company’s ability to keep decisions, priorities and action aligned while moving at speed. It is what lets a company go faster without pulling in four directions at once. Without it, speed is lost to rework, reversal, escalation and competing priorities.
What are the four dimensions?
How long a decision takes to move from raised to settled, and whether it settles at the level it should rather than travelling further up than it needs to.
Whether a decision, once made, holds, or gets quietly reopened. Measured by how often settled decisions come back for a second pass, and how much leadership time that costs.
How cleanly work moves from a decision to a delivered result, measured against how much of that work has to be redone, paused or dropped along the way.
How much change is running at once against what the company can structurally carry, starting with whether there is one complete view of every live initiative.
How is it measured?
Mostly from what your company already produces in the course of running itself: decision records, approval trails, plan against actual, portfolio and delivery data. Where the records don’t hold the answer, leadership teams score their own execution in a facilitated session. Every part of the score shows where it came from, so you can see what rests on records and what rests on judgement.
See The ECI Baseline for how this runs in practice.
How is it different from operational efficiency, agile or OKRs?
Those frameworks each manage one part of the system. OKRs set direction. Agile organises delivery cadence. Operational efficiency programmes remove waste from fixed processes. Execution coherence sits underneath all three: it measures whether decisions, priorities and action stay aligned while the company moves, whatever framework it is using to move. It is a measure of capacity, not a replacement for any of them.
Who created it?
The ECI was created by Alice Phillips and Rob Anderson, authors of The Stillness Dividend.
Where to start
If you want to test this against your own company, the Coherence Challenge is ten questions and takes five minutes. Nothing is collected and nothing is scored.
If you want to put the same questions to your own team, take it to the room. The one-page version, offered at the end of the Challenge, takes twenty minutes. Or ask us to run it at your next board meeting, which takes ninety.
If you already know you want the measurement, the ECI Baseline is where it starts. From there, the 90-Day Coherence Build runs in three fixed periods. Your Baseline does not change which periods run. It changes where the weight goes, how deep each one runs, and which measures you are judged against at day ninety.