Coherence lab landing v3 · HTML Copy The Coherence Lab
Executive Leadership Intensive

The Coherence
Lab

Your team is capable of navigating what's coming. The Coherence Lab gives you the infrastructure to do it together — with clarity, with speed, and without losing what you stand for.

Bring this to your team See how it works
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The Problem

The best teams don't eliminate tension. They learn to hold it.

AI is accelerating every decision your organization makes. That's not a problem — it's an opportunity. But only if your team has done the foundational work: naming what you actually optimize for, where your commitments compete, and what you'd never trade away no matter the pressure.

Most teams haven't done that work. Not because they don't want to. Because no one has created the conditions to do it well.

That's what the Coherence Lab is for.

  • 1
    Moving fast, deciding inconsistentlyVelocity is up. But the logic behind decisions isn't shared — so alignment erodes every time you're not in the room.
  • 2
    AI pressure without a foundationEvery AI system you deploy has to optimize for something. If your team hasn't made that explicit, your systems will decide for you.
  • 3
    Alignment that holds in meetings, drifts in executionThe team agrees in the room. Two weeks later, people are back to optimizing for different things. The gap isn't motivation — it's infrastructure.
  • 4
    Strategy that lives in the leader's headThe vision is clear to you. The judgment behind your hardest calls isn't shared — and that creates dependency your organization can't afford.
The Session

Six movements.
One coherent team.

The Coherence Lab is a facilitated intensive — 2 focused days — built to move your leadership team from fragile alignment to durable, operational coherence. Not by resolving every tension. By building the shared judgment to navigate them.

1
Arrive & Regulate
You can't do this work activated. Before we touch the agenda, we create the conditions for clear thinking. Executives arrive carrying the weight of everything outside this room. We start by putting that down.
Prepare for the Work
2
Name What We Don't Know
Honest uncertainty mapping — not a SWOT, not a brainstorm. A disciplined process for surfacing the forces actually shaping your organization. You'll filter for what's consequential, what's within your influence, and what deserves your attention right now.
Remove Cognitive Dissonance
3
Strategic Foresight
Immersive scenario work. You'll explore worst case and best case with enough specificity to feel the difference. Then you'll make a collective choice — the future your team commits to building. Not the most likely future. The one worth working toward.
Envision Preferred Future
4
Commitment Mapping
Your organization has a Commitment Stack — the values that actually govern decisions, not the ones on the website. We surface it together: what's active, what's been quietly suppressed, and where real tensions live. You'll feel those tensions, not just name them.
Identify Healthy Friction
5
Decision Velocity Infrastructure
Rules of Engagement that let your teams — and your AI systems — move at speed with shared judgment. Escalation thresholds. Visibility design. The architecture that makes tough calls consistent, whether you're in the conversation or not.
Make Wisdom Legible
6
Acknowledge & Commit
Most teams leave hard conversations with a polite consensus that dissolves by Monday. This movement does the opposite: you name what's still in tension, commit to holding it together rather than collapsing it, and leave with that commitment witnessed by everyone in the room.
Own Your Energy
What You Leave With

Not energy. Infrastructure.

01

Commitment Stack Map

The commitments your organization actually holds — active, suppressed, in tension. Visible. Referenced. Used when the next hard decision arrives.

02

Preferred Future Narrative

A shared statement of the future you're building — specific enough to say no to the things that would take you off course.

03

Decision Architecture Framework

Your if-then logic. When commitments compete, which wins? Built for human decisions and AI deployment alike — so clarity at the leadership level governs everything built on top of it.

04

Decision Velocity Canvas

Escalation thresholds and visibility design so teams move fast — and know exactly when to surface a conflict rather than absorb it.

05

Shared Language

The vocabulary that travels. Your people carry a shared way of naming tension and navigating it — in every room, with or without you present.

06

A Witnessed Commitment

The room watched your team choose to hold its tensions rather than collapse them. That witnessed moment is worth more than any framework on the wall.

This is not a retreat. It's not consulting. It's not therapy.

Offsites give you energy that fades. Consulting gives you slides that sit. Therapy gives you insight that's hard to share. The Coherence Lab gives you infrastructure — shared judgment your whole team can use, starting Monday.

  • ✗
    Not a values exercise or culture workshop
  • ✗
    Not change management or behavioral modification
  • ✗
    Not a 200-slide strategy deck
  • ✗
    Not a team-building experience
  • ✗
    Not another framework to install and forget
The Facilitators

Two practitioners.
One methodology.

Built to work together. Accepting a limited number of engagements annually.

Michael Valverde

Focus · Decision Architecture · Strategic Foresight · Civic Sensemaking

15+ years leading executive collaboration, systems thinking, and organizational design. Recruited to the AI Leadership Council at Envestnet — a $4.5B fintech serving 16 of the top 20 U.S. banks — to embed decision coherence across five business units during a high-stakes private equity spin-out.

The teams that last aren't the ones who resolved every tension. They're the ones who built the infrastructure to hold it.

He also leads the Community Coordination Commons — a civic sensemaking series working with parents, educators, students, and leaders across the NC Triangle to think clearly about shared futures. The executive work and the civic work strengthen each other.

Bradley McDevitt, MA, ACC

Focus · Embodied Leadership · Depth Psychology · Theater of Self

30+ years in professional theater creation, performance, and pedagogy. Leadership coach with the Center for Creative Leadership. Adjunct faculty in depth psychology and creativity at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Founder of Theater of Self — a methodology for leaders who need to maintain presence and authority when the stakes are highest.

Presence isn't a trait. It's a capacity — and like any capacity, it can be trained.
Start the Conversation

Your team is capable of this.
Let's build the conditions for it.

The Coherence Lab is a 2 day facilitated intensive for leadership teams of 6 to 14. Engagements are limited. The first step is a real conversation about fit — no pitch, no deck.

No pitch. No deck. Just an honest conversation about whether this is the right fit.