Why Alignment Feels Productive… and Often Isn’t

Kumbaya of Unicorns and Rainbows in ‘nice’ workshops

Alignment feels reassuring.

Shared language emerges. Agreement is visible. The room leaves with a sense of progress.

Which is precisely why it can be misleading.

A tension many leaders experience

Leadership teams invest heavily in alignment sessions. Strategy offsites. Vision workshops. Road-mapping exercises.
The immediate outcome is positive. People feel heard. Direction appears clear.
Then execution fragments.
Different parts of the organization interpret the same conversation in different ways. Decisions diverge. Momentum dissipates.
This is not because people resisted.
It is because they understood different things.

A perspective that challenges the default

Alignment is not a substitute for understanding.

In complex environments, agreement reached too early often masks unresolved assumptions, unspoken constraints, and conflicting interpretations of risk.
The organization appears aligned, but the system has not been understood.

Why this matters

In complex contexts, cause and effect are not linear. Outcomes emerge over time, shaped by interactions rather than plans. When leaders treat complex challenges as if they were merely complicated, they tend to over-invest in alignment and under-invest in sensemaking.

Alignment answers the question, “Can we agree?”
Sensemaking answers a different question, “Do we understand the constraints in the system well enough to act responsibly?”

The second is harder. It requires slowing down before speeding up. It requires surfacing disagreement rather than smoothing it over.

A useful reframe for leaders

Alignment that follows sensemaking is powerful.

Alignment that replaces sensemaking is fragile.

When teams rush to agreement, they often align around assumptions that were never examined.
Execution then fails not because the strategy was wrong, but because the system’s constraints were misunderstood.

The work is not to eliminate disagreement.
The work is to ensure disagreement is informed.

(Drawing on work by Weick, Snowden, MIT Sloan, and OECD on sensemaking and decision-making in complex systems)