Our key differentiators

Experience - Proven in-market expertise spanning business, experience design and IT services. 

Economics - Outcome-focused. Fixed price, fixed duration projects. 

Neutrality - Your interests first. No “partnerships” or referral fees. Our only source of revenue is our own work.

At the core: Our Values. 

Everyone at Coherent Ways has extensive practical experience in various roles conceiving, designing, building and deploying digital products, content, services and experiences at every scale and on every device.  

We've worked at IT services firms, digital agencies, and software companies.  We know how things work and we know what's broken. We know that the traditional business models of technology and design consultancies are not geared towards empowering and uplifting clients, only giving them the latest shiny gizmo with service contracts and perpetual upgrades. After a lot of drama, time and money, all too often, most of the technologies our clients have put in place are not being used well - or at all. 

We knew there needed to be a different, values-based and client-positive approach.  

At Coherent Ways, we want to help break the never-ending dependency on the so-called "rare" skills, closed systems, and proprietary knowledge.  We want our clients to learn and grow technology and experience design skills as a core competency so they can treat technology as their strategic advantage, not just a cost.

Our Core Values

At the beginning, co-founders Oscar Aird and Martin Focazio developed a core set of values; these are the essence of how Coherent Ways thinks and works. 

Be Thoughtful. 

Focus on the purpose of the organization, not the technology.

A fire truck does not put out fires. Firefighters do. This seems obvious, but when it comes to digital technology, the focus seems to be on the AI, the new web site, the new eCommerce platform, the new CRM tool and so on. So, when we put "Be Thoughtful" at the top of our values list, we mean literally ignoring the technology and thinking about the purpose of the organization and what it does. 

Be Human. 

Make technology serve the needs of people.

Ask a doctor about Electronic Health Records and you'll almost universally get a sad sigh - this and other similar technology reduces humans to "users" and "use-cases," not people with things to do.  We rigorously defend humanity from the idiocy of bad technology experiences and insist that technology is supposed to help people, not vice versa. 

Normalize Technology. 

Take the magic out of the tech.

There are people who have never driven a car, but they could learn at any time. To drive, they don't need to know how to rebuild the engine, but they do need to know the fundamentals of vehicles and the rules of the road. Technology is no different - and people can learn to "drive" technology in the same way they can learn to drive a vehicle; it isn't magic, it's just a mix of skills and knowledge.  We teach skills and transfer knowledge so there's no magic in how technology can best work for people and organizations.