The Alignment Illusion

You’ve been in this meeting. The leadership team has spent a morning in a hotel function room with a view of the car park, working through the new strategy. Around eleven, someone proposes that the organisation become “more customer-centric”. Heads nod. Somebody writes it on the whiteboard and underlines it twice. There’s a palpable sense of progress, possibly helped by the arrival of the scones.

Everyone walks out aligned. Six months later, nothing has moved, and nobody can quite say why.

The reason is usually sitting on that whiteboard. The head of sales heard “customer-centric” and thought it meant more discretion to discount. Operations heard faster delivery. Finance heard focusing on the customers who actually make money, which, awkwardly, means getting rid of some of the ones sales wants to discount for. The head of HR heard something about frontline training and was quietly drafting a budget request before morning tea had finished.

All of them agreed. None of them agreed with each other.

Words like “customer-centric”, “transformation”, “engagement” and, of course, “alignment” itself are wonderfully stretchy. They have just enough meaning to sound substantial and just little enough that everyone can pour their own version into them. That’s what makes them so popular in strategy sessions. They let a room full of people with genuinely different views reach agreement in record time, mostly by not finding out what the others think.

Linguists have a name for this kind of looseness, and it isn’t a compliment. A word that means everything to everyone is close to meaning nothing in particular, and a strategy built on it has a hole in the middle you could drive a delivery truck through. Operations, presumably, would like it delivered faster.

The irony is that the disagreement is the most valuable thing in the room. It’s where the real choices are hiding. Should sales discount to win the customer, or should finance be allowed to drop unprofitable ones? That’s a proper strategic question, the kind leadership teams are paid to settle. The stretchy word lets everyone skip it, and because nobody had the argument in March, it turns up later disguised as a missed target, a budget fight, or two managers who’ve stopped copying each other into emails.

I’d much rather a leadership team had the fight in the room, where it’s cheap, than months later in the corridors, where it’s expensive and nobody admits it’s happening.

Getting the fight into the room is surprisingly easy. The next time a team agrees on one of these words, stop before anyone reaches for the whiteboard marker. Ask everyone to write down, privately, one sentence describing what the word will mean in practice. Not a definition from a dictionary or a consultant’s slide, but something specific: what will we do differently, and what will we stop doing?

Then read them out.

The first time a team does this, there’s often a long silence, followed by someone saying, “Well, that’s not what I meant at all.” It’s one of my favourite moments in any workshop. It looks like the strategy is falling apart. In fact it’s the first time it has been put together properly.

From there, the conversation changes. People stop arguing about whether to be customer-centric, which nobody opposed in the first place, and start arguing about what it will cost and who gives something up. It’s harder and less comfortable, and it occasionally requires a second plate of scones. But it ends with an agreement people can actually act on, because they know what they’ve agreed to.

None of this means banning the big words. “Customer-centric” is a perfectly good heading. It just can’t do the work on its own. Underneath it you need the plain sentences that say who does what, for whom, and what stops as a result. If the team can’t write those sentences, it hasn’t finished deciding, however aligned everyone felt on the way out.

So be a little suspicious of the meeting where everyone agrees quickly and goes to lunch early. Real agreement tends to take longer, and it usually involves somebody saying something mildly unwelcome before morning tea.