Alignment: the comfortable illusion before execution collapses

There is a scene in Reservoir Dogs where Mr White defends Mr Orange against mounting evidence that he is the police informant who has destroyed their operation. The facts point one way. The trust points to another.

He is, of course, catastrophically wrong.

White's logic was flawless. His trust was real. But his entire framework for loyalty had nothing to do with actual loyalty. He was playing chess on a different board.

This is how alignment fails in organisations. Not with shouting matches, but with frameworks that sound smart and deliver chaos. Everyone leaves the meeting nodding. Three months later, nobody can explain what happened. No one rebelled. The plan just meant different things to different people, and nobody forced a reckoning.

Alignment did not fail. It worked exactly as designed.

The next satisfying illusion to dismantle

If you have followed this series, you will recognise a pattern.

Implicit strategy creates bottlenecks. The solution is clarity. Clarity without decision rights creates latency. The solution is alignment. Alignment without consequences creates drift. The solution is better incentives.

Each fix solves the last problem and quietly seeds the next. It's whack-a-mole with organisational dysfunction. The moles always win.

Here's the last illusion: alignment, if you do it right, leads to execution.

It doesn't.

In most companies, alignment is a ritual. It looks like progress, but it's just ambiguity with better choreography.

Clarity, alignment, execution

Clarity is understanding, not commitment. Clarity is cognitive. It helps people understand what the strategy says.

Alignment is coordination, not direction. Alignment is social. It helps people agree on what to do.

Execution is where trade-offs appear. Execution is operational. It forces trade-offs in real time.

Most companies treat these as steps. First clarity, then alignment, then execution. A tidy waterfall from boardroom to shop floor.

Except real waterfalls don't have politics.

The reality is harsher: each level can function perfectly while the system fails.

Clarity without alignment: everyone understands the strategy, but nobody agrees it is right. Alignment without clarity: everyone agrees on the direction, but nobody can articulate what it means.

And here's the punchline: you can have clarity and alignment, and still watch execution collapse. Because when reality pushes back, people don't follow the plan.

They follow the scoreboard.

Clarity makes things understandable. Not binding. Alignment gets people moving in sync. Not always in the right direction.

The ice cream call

Years ago, I received a phone call that seemed too good to be true.

A major German retail chain had just lost its anchor brand in a key category. The market leader had walked away from the negotiating table. Nearly a thousand stores were about to have a visible gap on their shelves.

The chain needed alternatives. Fast. A buyer who had previously treated me as a minor inconvenience was suddenly asking for our full product sheets. His tone was almost civil. I briefly checked for signs of a stroke.

I called the founder. Explained the opportunity. Explained the odds.

This was a category where we had never gained traction, and the specifics of the situation made it even more challenging. Difficult product. High price. Low awareness. Brutal listing fees. Staff incentivised to push private labels. And with nearly a thousand locations and one sales agent covering an area the size of a large country, there was no way to execute a ground campaign in time.

Every signal said: walk away.

The founder listened. I heard hesitation, a pause I should have explored. Maybe asked what he really thought.

Then came the pivot. Suddenly, I was hearing about Stalingrad. Not one step back. We cannot fail.

We were aligned.

Briefings followed, along with calls with marketing, sales, and agencies I had never met before. Everyone understood the stakes. Everyone repeated the same words: urgency, visibility, "this matters".

I focused on what I could control: the sell-in. Four trucks shipped to the chain's central warehouse, on time, complete, no excuses. My job ended where theirs began. How they distributed to individual stores, which locations they prioritised, and whether they followed the agreed geographic rollout: that was their decision, their process, their black box.

Demand generation? Handled somewhere else, in rooms I wasn't in. I assumed decisions were happening. I assumed the machine was moving.

One week before launch, I still had no details on media. When I asked, the answer was always the same:

"It's coming. We're aligned."

The Sunday before shelf day, I was eating ice cream with my son when my phone rang.

"I am only now learning that we needed radio."

I remember the cone cracking in my hand. Ice cream melting fast against skin gone hot with something between panic and rage. Sticky trails down my wrist while I tried to find words. My son asking why my face looked funny.

We were aligned. I would swear to it under oath.

The radio campaign aired a week after products hit shelves.

Only then, from the distribution data, did we discover what the chain had actually done: some stores served, others ignored, our geographic priorities dismissed without a word. We had shipped enough product to fill a thousand stores. They had decided, without telling us, to fill far fewer.

Later, I was promoted. Recognition for potential unlocked, even though we failed to capture it. The failure dissolved into folklore. "Not like that time when…" aimed carefully at no one in particular.

Stalingrad, it turned out, applied only to the soldiers. Not to the ammunition.

The theatre of consensus

A.k.a. alignment rituals that feel like progress.

Every organisation has alignment rituals. The offsite. The quarterly review. The town hall with the inspirational video that cost more than someone's annual salary.

You know the atmosphere. Hands clapping. Glasses clinking. Collar buttons quietly loosened as enthusiasm meets metabolism.

I've sat in planning meetings that ran until 7 pm on December 24th. Fierce debates. Whiteboards photographed, shared, and forgotten by January 2nd.

I have watched sales teams at launch events, rivers of champagne flowing, where questioning the plan would have felt like heckling at a canonisation. Santo subito.

I have sat in OKR sessions where the objective was already set: 30% growth. The meeting was supposed to define how we would get there. The founder opened the floor for key results, and the room went silent. Not the silence of concentration. People scanning for someone else's eyes, waiting for anyone to voice the doubt everyone felt. This is decision latency at its most corrosive: not slow approvals, but the slow death of dissent, second by second, until silence hardens into false consensus. Nobody spoke. The founder read alignment. Two days later, a quarter of the team resigned.

These rituals survive because they reduce anxiety, simulate control, and create the illusion of progress.

But nobody leaves having lost anything.

If everyone's priorities survive intact, no decision was made. If the plan includes everything, it's not a strategy. It's a wish list with a Gantt chart.

Execution is where postponed decisions come to die

Consider this situation we have all lived through at least once: sales pushing promotions to hit month-end targets. Procurement optimising inventory for steady rotation. Both executing flawlessly by their own scorecards.

Then the promotion lands. Shelves go empty. Or the promotion flops. Warehouses fill with stock.

Nobody made a mistake. The system did. Two smart local moves, one global failure.

Execution doesn't fail because people ignore the plan. It fails because they follow it to the letter. And the plan was never sharp enough to survive reality.

Without clear trade-offs, people adapt. Their logic. Their incentives. Their version of "aligned".

The result is coordinated divergence: everyone moving with purpose, in slightly different directions. Each convinced they're the reasonable one.

And this is the part most leaders miss:

Alignment collapses exactly where incentives diverge. Not because people are malicious. Because under pressure, the bonus is louder than the deck.

Stop blaming communication

Misalignment is often a system design problem. When people interpret the same strategy differently, the instinct is to blame communication. Clearer memos. Better cascading. More alignment meetings.

But the real issue runs deeper: they understand different things because the system allows different interpretations, and nothing forces reconciliation until reality does.

Give people overlapping objectives with no clear pecking order, and they'll chase the one tied to their bonus. Give them fuzzy responsibilities, and they'll pick the safest path. Leave trade-offs unspoken, and they'll make them in private (usually in ways that clash with what's happening three desks away).

A strategy that can be read multiple ways, where all readings seem equally valid, where two people can nod at the same slide and walk away with opposite intentions, is not a strategy.

It is a Rorschach test with a budget attached.

One question. No comfortable answers.

Before your next leadership meeting:

Can two fully aligned teams in your organisation optimise in opposite directions and both claim success?

If yes, your alignment is theatre. The real decisions are being made elsewhere, by people who never agreed to the same trade-offs.

Alignment is not the destination

Clarity matters. Alignment helps. But neither is where you are trying to arrive. They are rest stops on a longer road, and too many organisations have set up camp there, mistaking the journey for the destination.

What you actually need is a system that makes the wrong thing hard and the right thing unavoidable. A system where doing the smart-but-misaligned thing is more painful than doing the right thing. Where the cost of defection is immediate, visible, and personal.

That kind of system requires exclusion. Real loss. Someone walking out of the room unhappy because their priority did not survive the conversation.

If your alignment process produces universal satisfaction, if everyone leaves smiling and no one leaves wounded, be suspicious. Unanimous enthusiasm usually means the hard choices are still ahead of you, waiting in ambush somewhere between the offsite and the quarterly review.

Everything else, the meetings, the workshops, the beautifully crafted decks, is just a more expensive way of postponing the conflict.

And the conflict, unfailingly, collects.

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