A case study in diagnosing the root causes beneath surface tension - and why treating symptoms will always ultimately fail.

by Helen Achterberg-Pentz 
​Pattern spotter, team coherence guide and strategic resourcing partner - restoring coherence in leadership teams

High-performing teams often mask their deepest fractures... until they break.  This article reveals why team tensions attributed to workload and slow decisions counterintuitively revealed coherence fracture at the PURPOSE level — and what the "Limits to Success" systems archetype tells us about why heroic performance is unsustainable.
Learn how to diagnose the real sources beneath surface tensions, before burnout becomes inevitable.

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Just about every HR leader I've worked with says the same thing:  "We're a strong team.  We work well together.  But..."

The "but" is usually about workload.  Or slow decisions.  Or reactivity.  Or broken communication.
But here's what I've learned: those aren't the problems.  They're symptoms.

Recently, I worked with a high-performing, tight-knit HR leadership team in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Nine people, deeply interdependent, managing the human resources function across a vast region facing significant organizational change.
Strong relationships.  High psychological safety.  Mature, thoughtful people.

My pre-Lab survey revealed their top tensions, which they attributed to workload and slow decision-making.   Reasonable conclusions.  And - as we discovered quite counter-intuitively, completely missing the root cause.
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The surprising diagnosis: PURPOSE fracture

The Coherence Practice™ starts with surfacing the obvious - the kind of misalignments, tensions or issues that can be addressed, decomposed and analytically understood from a mechanical point of view.  But then we change track and move into sense-making mode using methods that bypass analytical, overly-cognitive process.  The approach short-cuts laborious, intellectualised analysis, moving us into an intuitive process that reaches deeper, to the roots of team coherence, before resurfacing with a few simple, effort-light systemic levers of change.

When we applied the Coherence Triad framework — PURPOSE, RHYTHM, TRUST — and stepped through this unique process, something different emerged.

The team's PURPOSE was clear at the abstract level: "support the organisational mission."

But their actual purpose — what they're really responsible for, what boundaries should be held with demanding stakeholders, what's strategic vs. operational — had evolved over several years of substantial improvement in the team's delivery and credibility, driven hard by their strong leader.  But their purpose had quietly transformed without conscious attention and had, as their perceived value deepened, become fuzzy.

That fuzziness created reactivity.  Because every stakeholder demand felt equally important.  Every request was urgent.  Every deadline felt non-negotiable.   And HR had now become so integrated into the business that the nature of its value had evolved.

The team wasn't slow.  They are dedicated, high performing and capable, but becoming overwhelmed by competing, unfiltered demands and over-dependent stakeholders.

The workload and stakeholder demands that conflicted with mission-critical priorities wasn't the real problem – it was the signal.  Misaligned PURPOSE was engendering unsustainable workload.
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The systems archetype: Limits to Success

​What's happening here is a classic systems archetype called "Limits to Success."

Here's how it works:

1. Success:  The team delivers.  Consistently.  They're reliable, competent and well-led.
2. Growing Demand:  Their reliability breeds confidence.  Stakeholders ask more, want closer partnership, active participation in operational matters.  Deadlines get tighter, expectations higher.  The organization depends on them more.  They oblige.  Dependency grows further.
3. Adaptation Without Boundaries:  The team keeps saying yes.  They work harder, become excellent at reacting to unanticipated demands.  They stretch.  They remain committed.  They deliver heroically.
4. Invisible Limit:  Eventually, human capacity becomes the constraint.  But it's not obvious.  The team still delivers.  Just... less sustainably.
5. The Signal:  Frustration, overwhelm and communication breakdowns silently mount, unquestioned because the recipe was what brought their success.  Attention remains on delivery.  Conversations are more and more action-oriented.  Time for reflection is relegated to side conversations at the bi-annual teambuilding session, and occasional venting between a team member and the team lead, who advises them how best to prioritise the workload.
6. The Danger Zone:  Without explicit boundaries, the system doesn't adapt.  Demands keep growing.  Team capacity doesn't.  Balls begin to drop, conflict quietly mounts, relationships begin to deteriorate.  The gap widens silently until one day — burnout.  Resignation.  Fragmentation.

This is where high-performing teams break.  Not because they lack talent.
​Because success without boundaries breeds fragility.

Why treating symptoms fails

The team I worked with had already tried the obvious fixes:

• Tighter time management
• Faster decision-making processes
• More meetings to improve communication
• Process tweaks
• Improved access to the leader, to provide direction when conflicting priorities affect delivery

These are reasonable.  And useless without addressing PURPOSE.

Why?
Because if every request is equally important, faster decisions just mean faster "yes".
More meetings just surface more competing demands.  Better communication just clarifies the conflict more precisely.
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The real work lies upstream: Clarity on what this team IS responsible for, what boundaries exist, and how stakeholder expectations get managed against actual capacity.
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What coherence actually requires

Coherence in a team — the sense that people trust one another, know what matters, communicate honestly, and move with natural rhythm — requires clarity at the essence layer, not just the lived, observable behavioural layer.

You can't fix PURPOSE fractures with better meetings.
You can't fix RHYTHM fractures with faster processes.
You can't fix TRUST fractures with better communication.

Those are attempts to treat symptoms.  And the danger is that the wrong fix only exacerbates incoherence.

​Real coherence work goes deeper.
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It asks:  What is actually fractured?  PURPOSE (direction), RHYTHM (timing), or TRUST (safety)?
And then: What levers, what structural changes — what conversations with stakeholders, what explicit boundaries, what reframing of the team's role — would address that root cause?

Here's what makes this so difficult: high-performing teams MASK coherence fracture.

The deceptive safety of high performance

Strong relationships let you work around misalignment.  High trust means you're willing to absorb unclear expectations.  Psychological safety means you'll voice frustration — but heroically keep delivering anyway.

So the team feels good.  They're kind to each other.  They communicate well.  They get things done.

But they're doing it at cost.  Unsustainable cost.

The team in this case study are not broken.  They're not fragile.  They're strong, held together by excellent relational trust, strong leadership, and high levels of personal commitment.

But they're also one crisis away — not from fragmentation, because they won't fragment.  They'll break.  Burnout.  Resignation.  Loss of key people.
​Then suddenly you lose institutional knowledge and momentum.

What changed?

In a 90-minute pilot, we:

1. Surfaced the data:  A pre-Lab survey signalled the disparity in lived experience viewed through six lenses of alignment.  While generally at or above the 50th percentile and mostly balanced, the team’s own sense of alignment was almost without exception below the leader’s perception.  And there was noticeable dissonance - a signal of imbalance - on two behaviour-related aspects.
2. Applied the Coherence Practice™ process:  Ah-ha moments emerged, not around where coherence was strongest (TRUST, relational integrity) or the superficial diagnosis of misaligned RHYTHM (pace, adaptability, workflow), but where it was actually strained (PURPOSE - clarity around mission, boundaries and priorities).
3. Diagnosed the root:   Using the Coherence Triad as a lens, the team recognised that PURPOSE — clarity on their strategic role vs. reactive operational demands — was in fact the primary fracture.
4. Validated the insight:  We connected this back to their lived experience.  Every tension they had named traced back to unclear PURPOSE.  Workload?  Symptom of accepting every demand as equally important.  Slow decisions?  Symptom of trying to handle competing, unfiltered demands.  Reactivity?  Symptom of no framework for what's strategic vs. reactive., what’s mission-aligned vs. operational.  Poor feedback on interdependent tasks?  Symptom of time constraints and reactive task prioritisation.
5. Designed next steps:  The team identified that greater PURPOSE clarity would require:
   • An explicit team charter or value statement
   • Transparent, shared prioritisation framework built in consultation with stakeholders
   • Capacity management integrated into planning
   • Stakeholder boundary conversations led by leadership

​The work isn't done.

​But the diagnosis is accurate.  And the path forward is clear.

What I learned

​This was my first Coherence Lab.  The 90-minute format was insufficient — we got diagnosis without embodied shift.
But it proved the framework works, the process is sound - and surprisingly cognitively light.

More importantly, it highlighted how high-performing teams often miss their biggest fractures because their strength masks the strain.

The intervention isn't harder work.

It's clearer work.  More bounded work.  Work that's strategically relevant, not just urgent.

For your team

If you recognise this pattern — strong relationships, high performance, but underlying tension about workload, decision speed, or reactivity — you might have a PURPOSE fracture.

Ask yourself:

• Are we crystal clear on our strategic role vs. operational execution?
• Do stakeholders know our boundaries?
• Is capacity explicitly discussed in planning?
• Do we have a clear framework for priority management, or just competing demands?

If you're uncertain as a group, that's the fracture.

Coherence isn't built through better meetings or faster processes.
It's built through clarity at the essence layer: clear PURPOSE, sustainable RHYTHM, and genuine TRUST

Without that, even your best teams will eventually break.

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AUTHOR BIO:  Helen Achterberg-Pentz is the founder of Solfeggio, a consulting practice specializing in team coherence, and author of the Architecture of Coherence, which informs The Coherence Practice™ — a process designed to build the capacity to sense, diagnose and repair fractures in direction, timing, and trust.  She draws on systems thinking, neuroscience, and organizational architecture to help leadership teams build sustainable high performance.
​​Reach out to Helen on LinkedIn.