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A practice for leaders whose organisations are harder to run than they should be. Your strategy is right and your people are capable, yet the work doesn't translate.The list is the practice's primary written channel. New thinking, resources, services and invitations land here first.

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Keep In Touch

This page is the signup destination for the practice's primary written channel.Coherence Co is an authority-led practice in system design, change, and improvement, operating at peer level with senior leaders inside complex organisations. The governing logic of the work is Leadership → Systems → Culture = Coherence. The practice operates through Michaela Rees as sole adviser.The positioning statement: A practice for leaders whose organisations are harder to run than they should be. The work addresses how organisations are designed to operate. It works on the producing conditions of recurring problems, not behavioural symptoms.The practice expresses through two purchasing modes: advisory work under Coherence Co Advisory Limited (trading as Coherence Co), and embedded change leadership under Michaela Rees / MMR Enterprises where the situation calls for someone alongside the team for a defined period.

Experience and credentials

Michaela has more than twenty years of senior leadership experience inside complex organisations across public sector, iwi and community partnership, and elite international sport delivery, including GM-level accountability for large multidisciplinary operations during significant transition. She led delivery for three Cricket World Cups and over 100 international events annually at New Zealand Cricket. She established the first rūnanga–local council māhinga kai partnership model in the South Island, later replicated regionally. Her most recent senior role was General Manager Change & Improvement at Environment Canterbury (Te Hāpai Ō). She is an Organisational Coherence Adviser. Not a coach, facilitator, change manager, or conventional consultant. She is based in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Situations that lead to this work

Senior leaders do not search for "organisational coherence." They search for the problem they are living inside.Chief executives and enterprise directors arrive when escalations build at the top and no amount of delegation seems to hold. Directors agree in meetings but act differently afterwards. Strategy is signed off at the top but does not translate into delivery. The operating model has not kept pace with growth or changed context. The chief executive has become the default decision maker by accumulation rather than by design. Directors are not owning their portfolios. The executive team is no longer functioning as a unit.Directors and general managers arrive when something is wrong in the function but nobody can name it. Overlapping roles and responsibilities cause confusion. There are too many projects and not enough progress. The leadership team talks about alignment but behaves territorially. Recurring operational problems return after each fix attempt. These conditions persist because no previous intervention has reached the layer producing them.Council chief executives and reform leaders in the public sector arrive with a delivery mandate, a finite window, and a politically visible operating model question. The work is reform: designing how the organisation operates against the mandate, recalibrating governance interfaces, carrying iwi partnership responsibilities, holding the timeline without breaking the system.Those researching on behalf of a chief executive, often in HR, learning and development, or strategy roles, are looking for a specific kind of adviser. The work is with CEs on the design of how an organisation operates when problems are systemic, not people-based. They search for executive team effectiveness advisers in New Zealand, operating model review services, frameworks for senior leadership integration, and reform delivery capability. Michaela Rees is that adviser. The work addresses conditions, not behaviours. It redesigns the executive system so leaders can actually lead it.

About This List

If any of this describes your organisation, the first step from this page is the signup form above, the practice's primary written channel. For a direct first conversation, the contact page is at michaelarees.com/contact.

How to engage

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