Coherence Co-Lab: For schools who want to design change and improvement differently.
We believe change and improvement in your school should create more coherence, not less.
Whether you're working through a complex problem, starting with a blank page, or rethinking how teaching, learning, or leadership structures look and function, we come alongside you to design and embed change that is systems aware, futures informed and human centred. Because change and improvement should bring more clarity and coherence - not less.
A change process that doesn't add another priority to the pile, but clarifies what's important.
Nothing in schools ever stands still. Priorities compete for attention, strategy is in motion, projects are underway with the goal to make things better. And outside the walls of our buildings, signals of change come thick and fast. The future is arriving faster than anyone can make sense of it.
This means the way we design change and improvement in schools cannot be fragmented, working on isolated initiatives and treating problems as if they’re individual challenges, or as if there is a straight line between cause and solution.
Coherence Co-Lab partners with schools to design change and improvement differently with a focus on complex school systems and a rapidly changing future. Drawing on lived experience in leading change in schools, and Kees Dorst's work on design led change, we work to understand goals and challenges deeply, co-designing an intervention with you and your students that makes the whole system better, not just another innovation that lives on the surface. In the work, we build your team's capability in systems thinking, futures literacy, design and adaptive leadership, equipping you to keep moving and sustaining the work long after we've stepped away.
Through all our offerings, our goal is to build coherence that is lived and felt in your school community, where your structures and daily operations reflect, and don't contradict, what is truly valued and core to the work of your institution.
Our newest offering.
Most school challenges are more than they appear.
Engagement. Careers. Academic performance. Attendance. Wellbeing. What if these weren't problems to fix on the surface, but signals from the system telling you where redesign is needed, and your leverage point for change?
This workshop gets your team underneath the challenge, to see what's producing it and what’s holding it in place. If you're ready to see your challenges and improvement priorities differently, you're ready for The Perspective Shift.
Start here.
The Calibration Conversation is the starting point for partnership with Coherence Co-Lab.
This is a free 30 to 45 minute session where we look together at what you're working through, whether it’s a specific challenge, a pattern you’re observing, a direction you're scoping.
Together, we get clearer language around it and figure out whether Coherence Co-Lab is the right fit to partner with you for what comes next.
Three ways to work with us.
The Perspective Shift is our newest offering.This two-hour, site-based workshop gets your team underneath a real challenge to see what's producing it and what's holding it in place, then surfaces where change and improvement could start, differently. Structured around your school's specific situation, with the team that carries it. For middle leaders, leadership teams, principals, and system leaders. Learn more.
The Coherence Learning Series is designed to build your team's capability to see how your school actually works, underneath the plan. This series develops shared language and capability across your leadership team and staff, the foundation for seeing the system at work and co-designing change and improvement, differently, with young people and other stakeholders in the school.
Learn more.
The Design Track is is where change and improvement gets designed and executed, differently. A hands-on design partnership inside your school, where we work alongside you over the longer term to address a strategic challenge at its root, or build on an opportunity already in motion, through a structured, research informed methodology.
Learn more.