When Coherence Starts Propagating Faster Than Drift

Discipline as the work of staying self-governed in a drifting world

Dec 17, 2025

When you sit in front of an orchestra, there is a small moment before the first note where nothing has happened yet.

Musicians are still. Bows hover. Fingers rest on keys. From the outside it looks like silence, but inside every person there is tension, attention, a charged readiness. Then the conductor moves, and dozens of separate bodies behave as if they were one.

You do not listen to them one by one.
You just hear the music.

If most of the players are in tune and responsive, the piece feels natural. Your body settles into it. If one loud player misses, you flinch, even if you cannot say why. If enough people drift from the score, the whole thing begins to sound wrong. You might not be able to name the instrument that failed, but you recognize that something is off.

Behind that sound there is something simple.
Each musician carries their own form of discipline. Scales repeated for years. Phrases broken down and rebuilt. Corrections heard so often they turn into muscle memory. None of that appears as a separate track in the concert. It is baked into how the whole orchestra behaves.

Any living system feels similar.

A family, a team, a company, your inner life. You do not walk around thinking in diagrams. You feel the mood of the system. How conversations land. How decisions happen. How heavy or light the room feels. Underneath, there are individuals with their own level of coherence and their own level of drift.

In the last article I wrote about coherence as fractal: a system cannot stay more coherent than the people who compose it.

This time the focus shifts from a single snapshot to movement.
Less about how coherent a system looks from the outside, and more about how coherence and drift move through it.

Drift never appears from nowhere.
If you find drift in a system, it arrived through someone or something.

Two forces that never turn off

Forget labels for a moment and look at your day.

There are moments where your actions line up with what you say you care about. You follow through on a promise. You tell the truth even though bending it would feel easier. You close the pantry door because you realise you are about to snack on autopilot.

That is coherence.
Your values and your behaviour meet in the same place, at least for that moment.

Then there are moments where something pulls you away from that line.

You catch yourself scrolling without remembering why you unlocked the phone.
You delay the uncomfortable conversation.
You say yes to something you do not want, just to avoid friction.

That is drift.
You slide away from what you chose, usually in small, ordinary moves.

Both forces are always present.

Coherence is the part of you that remembers the direction you picked.
Drift is the part that wants relief, comfort, certainty, control.

Drift behaves a lot like gravity. It does not need planning or structure.
If you leave a system alone with no maintenance, drift takes over. It tends to propagate faster because it is already there, waiting, a background pull that never turns off.

Drift is a natural force. Treating it like an enemy you must exterminate only hides what it can tell you. Boredom can point at work that does not matter. Resistance can highlight something misaligned or frightening. The problem appears when drift becomes the only force, when every uncomfortable feeling pushes you away from what you chose.

You can see all of this in groups without using any theory.

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Bring one deeply disengaged person into a tired team and watch what happens. Jokes sharpen. Meetings lose substance. People drift toward minimum effort. Rotate one resentful family member through gatherings and watch how the atmosphere tightens around them.

That is the “rotten apple” story in real life.
The rot is drift moving without resistance.

Coherence is present too, but it needs help to move. It does not propagate by accident.

How coherence and drift actually propagate

Inside one person, the tension is clear.

There is a part of you that remembers your principles. It knows what you want your life to point to when things are quiet.

There is another part that wants out.
Out of discomfort, out of shame, out of uncertainty. That part reaches for distraction, delay or control.

Every action you take sends a signal about which part is steering.

You are exhausted. Your kid resists sleep. Your patience is thin.
You feel the sentence forming in your throat, the one that would land as a verbal slap. If you let it out, the signal that moves through the system is obvious: when things are hard, this is how we handle it here.

If you take one breath, say that you are angry, and still hold the boundary, a different signal travels. You have not erased the anger. You have made a different choice around it. If you repeat that move across many nights, your nervous system learns that you can feel something intense without handing it the keys.

That is propagation at the smallest scale.
A way of handling reality appears in one moment and then shows up again in other moments, contexts and relationships.

The same structure appears when you zoom out.

Take a family where most adults are dysregulated. Arguments escalate. People shut down. Phones win over presence. Repairs almost never happen. Drift does not stay inside a single body. It moves through the entire household. Children absorb it. Yelling, avoidance and cold silence become their baseline idea of how families work.

Now imagine one adult in that same house with steady regulation practices.

They still feel anger, shame, fear.
They also:

Say “I am angry” instead of pretending they are fine
Apologise when they snap
Come back after conflict
Show a visible pause between feeling and acting

Across many moments, children tend to orbit around the caregiver who feels most emotionally safe. They borrow this person’s strategies. How they breathe when they are upset. The words they use when they are overwhelmed. The way they come back after a rupture.

Coherence has started to propagate.
A specific way of handling stress moves from one nervous system into others.

The same thing happens in a small team.

Founders declare values like learning, ownership, honesty. Those words do not mean much until they travel through behaviour.

A launch goes sideways. One founder feels the urge to hide a mistake or blame someone else. If they follow that urge, drift gets another channel. The implicit rule becomes simple: we protect appearances first. People learn fast.

If instead the founder puts the actual situation on the table, names their part in it and asks for help, a different rule starts to move through the group. Those values stop being decoration and turn into something people have actually seen under pressure.

Repeat that a few times.
Others copy it. New hires catch it. The pattern spreads.

For the last couple of weeks I have been working on a whitepaper that lays out a model I call Coherence Dynamics Theory. It is my attempt to describe these patterns more formally. In that paper I describe this specific pattern as the Coherence Propagation Principle: in any living system, coherence and drift are both trying to move. The side that propagates more often and more widely ends up defining how that system feels from the inside.

You do not need to remember the name.
You already know the experience.

Where discipline comes in

If drift is always on and coherence needs support to move, discipline starts to look different.

This is where many people switch labels and talk about good habits or emotional regulation. Those matter, and I still call this discipline. In this context, discipline means taking responsibility for how your inner signals move into the world. It keeps self-governance alive, even when drift would feel easier in the moment.

Discipline is the work you do to keep yourself governed in the presence of drift.

It is what keeps you coherent enough that your principles still reach your behaviour. Without that work, drift slowly becomes the only effective force, even if your values remain in a notebook somewhere.

In practice, this work is small and repetitive:

You notice the situations where you usually drift
You place simple guardrails around those places
You keep one or two anchor practices that stabilise you when life shifts
You repair when you fall short instead of editing the story to protect your ego

None of this removes drift. Drift does not retire.

What changes is the field around it. Coherent actions start to propagate more easily. The time between “I slipped” and “I came back” becomes shorter. That is your comeback speed. It is one of the clearest ways to see which signal is stronger in you right now.

Once that starts shifting inside, echoes appear:

The way you own a missed commitment at work starts to resemble how you own it at home
The way you return to a project after a gap feels similar to the way you return to your values after a rough season
The way you handle tension with your partner moves closer to the way you face tension with your cofounder

The work here is to build a governed self, one that lets coherence move, even if it never looks flawless.

What you can do with this

You do not need a full system to use any of this. You need one place to practice.

Think of a system where you feel drift right now:

A child who mirrors your impatience
A relationship where the same argument keeps replaying
A team that shifts direction every week
A project you say you care about and keep abandoning

Then walk through three questions.

1. Where am I giving drift a channel here.
Look for specific scenes. A delayed reply. A half-truth. A promise you keep sliding. These are the points where drift propagates through you.

2. Where do I already act as a coherent reference.
Maybe you always show up when you say you will. Maybe you repair after conflict. Maybe you are the one who brings actual numbers instead of guesses. These are places where coherence already moves through you into the system.

3. What is one specific return I am willing to practice repeatedly in this context.
Something small enough that you will actually do it. Naming your emotion before you speak. Closing the laptop at a set time. Admitting your part first. Walking away from the pantry.

Treat the answers as information, not as a verdict on your worth.

Then pick that one return and rehearse it.
Not once. Often.

The system around you may resist. Your kid might keep pushing. Your partner might wait to see if this change lasts. Your team might assume this is a phase. That lag is normal.

Some systems will not change, no matter how coherent you become. A family that refuses to look at reality. A company that rewards politics over truth. A relationship that only lives on complaint. In those cases, your discipline still matters, but the outcome is different. Coherence helps you see the system clearly and decide how much of yourself you want to keep investing there.

When coherence does begin to propagate, early signs are usually small. A softer reaction from your kid. One harder truth shared at work. One argument that ends with repair instead of silence. Treat those as signals that the new pattern is starting to travel, even if the old one still appears often.

Once you see that coherence and drift are always propagating, discipline stops feeling like an abstract trait.

It becomes a concrete choice.
To be one person through which coherent signals travel more often than not.
One musician who keeps their instrument in tune, even when the rest of the orchestra is still learning the piece.

Before we go…

I want to leave you with one idea.

Drift is data. It does not define your worth.

Coherence and drift always move together. Coherence grows by learning from drift; every return depends on a previous deviation. There is no path back without first noticing where you slipped.

When you feel that a small change will not matter, remember the ripples. It shifts something in you first, then in the systems you belong to. Each coherent move also limits how much drift other people can propagate through you.

Self-governance needs self-discipline, and self-discipline needs drift as the material it works with.

In the next paid companion, we will work on noticing drift in real time and sharpening your detection, so you can intervene before it spreads.

Have a wonderful week!

A note for early founders and solopreneurs

If you are building something and feel the drift in your business more than in your life, I am running a small experiment.

I am reaching to early founders and solopreneurs who feel stuck between too many priorities, unclear direction and constant fire-fighting. For each person, I take the chaos of their current situation, turn it into data and share a simple diagnosis plus one short experiment to test a better direction.

Because this is an experiment for my learning, the engagement is free.

If this sounds like you and you want to see how coherence could look inside your team, reply to this email with FOUNDER or leave a comment with that word and I will follow up with details.