When Leaders Ask for Alignment, Something Else Is Usually Happening.
Sometimes it feels like leaders reach for alignment the way we order the ‘healthy option’ … and then add fries.
It sounds constructive, avoids blame and implies unity. It gives the room something to do. But when alignment becomes the diagnosis, it often signals something more specific. The system is protecting an ambiguity it doesn’t want to face. Comfort dressed up as progress.
Action follows perception.
When the view is distorted, even sincere effort can deepen the suffering. Organizations don’t suffer in the metaphysical sense but they do burn time, trust, and momentum the same way, through disciplined effort applied to a misread problem.
The problem beneath “alignment”
Alignment isn’t something you install. It’s what remains after the organization can answer three uncomfortable questions without performing:
Who decides?
What are we choosing?
What are we explicitly not choosing?
When those answers are missing, “alignment” becomes a socially acceptable substitute for conflict. The word lets everyone keep their identity intact as collaborative, committed, even reasonable, while the hard edges of the decision stay untouched. Jonathan Trevor in Harvard Business Review defines strategic alignment as the “careful arrangement” of a company’s core value drivers, strategy, capabilities, culture, structure, processes, and systems. This definition is useful as it quietly reveals the trap. Leaders are treating alignment as coordination among parts, when the real gap is usually meaning and tradeoff.
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