I've always been a bit of a stickler for language. Not quite so much as Humpty Dumpty, who says to Alice during her adventures in Wonderland (a place with disturbing similarities to the 9 to 5 worlds that some of us inhabit): "When I use a word... it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." For me, words are nuanced, and specific - not used as a device of control but for the purpose of communicating new ideas by connecting them to things that people already understand.
Having said that, please know that I'm not upset when people use 'cohesion' when they are talking about 'coherence'. It's only in the interest of clarity that I'm even mentioning it.
Cohesion is the state of sticking together. On a team, cohesion accurately describes the traditional sense of everyone doing the same thing at the same time. (No I will not say "hold hands and sing Kumbaya," but if you thought of that, you've got the idea.) That kind of cohesion worked best back when there was one boss and he (it was almost always 'he') made all the decisions, and large numbers of people were actually doing the same thing.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Teamability™: Cohesion, Coherence, Clarity, and Connectedness
