People Who Perform Alignment
The Agreement That Isn't
In most meetings where decisions are made, there is a moment near the end where people indicate their agreement — sometimes explicitly, sometimes through silence, sometimes through the particular posture of nodding and writing. This moment looks like alignment. It is sometimes real. Frequently it is not. The people in the room have signalled that they heard the decision and will not publicly oppose it. What they have not necessarily signalled is that they will commit to it, advocate for it, or adjust their behaviour and priorities to execute it.
The performance of alignment is one of the most common and least discussed forms of organisational dysfunction. It is invisible at the meeting level, where everyone appears to be on board. It becomes visible at the execution level, where the things that were agreed to do not get done — or get done in forms that are technically compliant with the decision but not in the spirit of it. By then, the source is hard to identify. The execution failure is attributed to many things. The performed alignment that preceded it is rarely named.
Why People Perform Alignment
People perform alignment for reasons that are usually rational given the environment they are operating in. When disagreement has been experienced as unwelcome, people learn not to disagree in the room. When opposition to leadership decisions has been met with exclusion from future decisions, people learn that the cost of honesty exceeds the cost of compliance. When the culture rewards the appearance of cohesion over the substance of genuine buy-in, people perform cohesion and reserve their actual views for conversations outside the room.
None of this is dishonest in a simple sense. It is adaptive. People are responding intelligently to the incentives their environment has created. The problem is that the environment has been designed, often unintentionally, to optimise for the appearance of alignment rather than for alignment itself. And an appearance optimised environment will produce excellent appearances and unreliable execution.
The Cost Across the Organisation
Performed alignment costs the organisation in several ways simultaneously. At the strategic level, decisions are made without genuine input from people who have important perspective — because those people have learned that their perspective is not truly welcome. The decisions are therefore poorer than they would have been with honest dissent. At the execution level, commitment is partial — people are implementing decisions they do not believe in, which means they are implementing them at a fraction of the energy and creativity they would invest in decisions they genuinely owned.
And at the cultural level, performed alignment generates a particular form of cynicism: the privately shared awareness among people in the organisation that what happens in meetings is a performance, that real views are expressed only in back channels, and that the official conversation and the real conversation are different things. That cynicism corrodes trust, reduces engagement, and makes honest communication progressively harder to sustain.
Creating Conditions for Real Alignment
Real alignment is generated not by asking people to agree but by creating the conditions in which disagreement is genuinely welcomed. This is harder than it sounds. It requires leaders who respond to disagreement with curiosity rather than defensiveness — who hear opposition as information rather than as threat. It requires the explicit norm that the room is not done until genuine objections have been raised and addressed. It requires that raising an objection does not mark a person as a problem, and that changing a direction based on objection is not experienced as a defeat.
These conditions are not natural in most organisational environments. They are built — through repeated demonstration that disagreement is safe, that it influences decisions, that the people who offer it are valued rather than marginalised. That demonstration must come primarily from the most powerful people in the room, because the safety of disagreement is ultimately determined by what happens to the people who disagree with power.
Naming the Difference
One of the simplest things leaders can do to address performed alignment is to name the distinction explicitly — to say, in rooms where decisions are being made, that there is a difference between agreeing in the meeting and being committed to the execution, and that they want the latter rather than the former. That if someone has reservations, now is the time to raise them. That the commitment they are asking for is genuine and requires genuine input, not just the appearance of consensus.
This reframing does not solve the problem by itself. But it opens a door that most meetings keep closed — the door through which the actual views of the people in the room can enter the conversation that is shaping the organisation's direction.
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