Agreement is not the same as alignment

It’s surprisingly common for a leadership team to leave a planning session feeling aligned, only to discover a few weeks later that very little has changed in practice.

The goals were clear, the conversation felt constructive, everyone nodded at the right moments. And yet, once work begins, familiar tensions reappear; teams pull in slightly different directions, trade-offs are revisited, and decisions that seemed settled start to wobble.

In my experience, this rarely reflects a failure of intent or commitment, it’s more often a sign that agreement has been mistaken for alignment.

Agreement tends to focus on what we want to achieve. Alignment becomes visible later, when people have to decide how to act under constraint — what to prioritise when capacity tightens, what to defer when two important things compete, and whose needs take precedence when compromise is required.

If those conditions haven’t been explored explicitly, people will fill in the gaps themselves. They will usually do so thoughtfully, but they won’t necessarily do so consistently.

That’s when alignment slips; not because people weren’t listening, but because the system didn’t support shared decision-making once the meeting ended.