Why misalignment is not dysfunction
...and alignment becomes an excuse for inaction
In complex organisations, alignment is rarely what enables a decision. It is what becomes visible once the risk has been sufficiently diluted. By the time everyone is aligned, the decision has usually stopped being dangerous.
This is why alignment is so often requested precisely at the moment when something needs to be owned. It appears when a choice would create exposure: personal, political, reputational. Asking for more alignment is not a request for clarity. It is a request to remain unlocated.
What tends to be misunderstood is that collective decision-making does not fail because people disagree. It stalls because no one wants to be identifiable as the one who made the call. Alignment offers a solution to this problem. It allows action without authorship.
A decision taken by one person can be challenged. A decision taken by many becomes procedural. It belongs to the meeting, the deck, the process. Not to a judgement.
This is why alignment is framed as a virtue. It sounds careful. Inclusive. Mature. The language around it is deliberately soft: we’re not quite there, there are still concerns, let’s bring everyone along. None of these statements are false. They are simply incomplete. What they omit is the cost of waiting.
The word alignment itself does part of the work. It suggests mechanics rather than choice, adjustment rather than loss. As if there were a correct axis already in place, and people merely needed time to line up with it. In reality, the axis only becomes visible once a decision has been taken and defended. Before that, there is no neutral line to align to.
This is where misalignment enters the picture, usually treated as a defect. Divergent views surface. Timelines stop matching. Interpretations multiply instead of converging. The organisation begins to look messy, unsettled, unfinished. This is the moment that triggers process: Workshops. Clarifications. Reframing. Another round.
What is often happening in these moments is not dysfunction but relevance. Low-impact decisions align easily because nothing meaningful is at stake. High-impact decisions do not. They produce asymmetry: different people see different consequences, at different times, with different levels of personal risk. Expecting smooth convergence here is not realistic. It is avoidant.
Temporary misalignment is not an anomaly in these cases. It is a signal that the decision actually matters. Many organisations, however, lack the structural capacity to tolerate this phase. They do not have clear decision rights, or they do not trust them. They have learned to equate disagreement with breakdown. As a result, misalignment is treated as something to be eliminated as quickly as possible.
The emphasis quietly shifts. Not what are we deciding but how do we reduce friction. Not who decides but how do we make this feel acceptable. Comfort becomes the proxy for organisational health. This is where a subtle moral inversion takes place. Moving forward without full alignment is labelled reckless. Waiting is labelled responsible. Responsibility, here, is no longer about consequences. It is about tone. The person pushing for a decision is too fast. The person slowing things down is thoughtful. Over time, the system internalises this hierarchy.
The irony is that many of these organisations claim to value strong opinions and decisive leadership. In practice, they reward fluency in alignment language: the ability to speak without committing, to gesture without choosing, to remain technically active while staying substantively still.
Alignment then becomes retrospective. Once a direction proves safe, or at least survivable, the story rearranges itself. Objections are remembered as having been resolved. Doubts become healthy tension. The process is recalled as coherent. This retrospective alignment reassures the system that it functions. It also erases the opportunity cost of delay.
If everyone agrees before a decision, the decision probably does not matter. Choices that change something real almost always create disagreement. They produce losers, not just trade-offs. Demanding unanimity in those moments is not inclusive. It is a way of ensuring that nothing sharp happens.
What usually remains unspoken is that alignment is not evenly priced. Some roles can afford to be misaligned. Others cannot. Senior figures can survive disagreement. Peripheral ones pay for it quickly. This asymmetry shapes behaviour far more than stated values ever do. The result is an organisation that looks calm, reasonable, collaborative and moves slowly in ways that are difficult to name. Temporary misalignment is not the opposite of alignment. It is the condition under which alignment becomes meaningful rather than cosmetic. Without it, decisions flatten into gestures. With it, decisions acquire weight.
How much misalignment a system can tolerate before it fractures cannot be optimised away. It is not a framework problem. It is a judgement problem, exercised repeatedly, under pressure. And judgement, unlike alignment, cannot be crowdsourced indefinitely.