Imagine a team discussing a new way to present ideas to customers. One person is enthusiastic about what this could unlock. Another is skeptical, pointing out that the team doesn’t have the authority to change its approach. A third remembers negative customer feedback when something similar was tried before.

Who is being open-minded? And who isn’t?

We often interpret resistance to an idea as evidence of a closed mind. But the skeptical colleagues may be drawing on information that others don’t have. Their responses make sense given what they know, what they’ve experienced and where they sit in the organization.

Perhaps what looks like closed-mindedness is simply a different understanding of reality.

Open-mindedness isn’t just a personality trait

Open-mindedness is generally understood as a willingness to consider perspectives or evidence that challenge our existing beliefs. But that doesn’t mean treating every idea as equally credible or abandoning conclusions we have good reasons to hold.

Research by Stanovich and West (1997) on actively open-minded thinking highlights the importance of considering alternatives and being willing to revise beliefs when evidence warrants it.

Yet our willingness to do this doesn’t operate independently of our circumstances.

Because people working in different parts of an organization encounter different information, pressures and constraints, they understand how things work differently. A sales leader may see an opportunity that an operations leader sees as a delivery risk. Both may have perfectly reasonable grounds for their views.

Organizational research on sensemaking, notably Weick (1995), helps explain why and it sits at the heart of the Mirror Mirror ideology. People interpret situations through their experiences, identities and organizational contexts. They don’t necessarily see the same situation in the same way.

So before judging someone’s attitude, we might ask what makes their interpretation reasonable from where they stand.

Listening isn’t necessarily about changing minds

This raises an important distinction. Listening to someone doesn’t require us to agree with them or even expect to be persuaded.

It requires a genuine effort to understand what they see and why.

Research by Kluger and Itzchakov (2022) explores how high-quality listening can influence speakers’ openness and the quality of conversations. Listening creates opportunities for people to examine and articulate their thinking, rather than simply defend a position.

The purpose isn’t always to change minds. It’s to improve the quality of what people understand together.

Returning to our example, the enthusiastic colleague may discover an important constraint. The skeptical colleague may discover that circumstances have changed since the previous attempt. Neither has to abandon their original view for the conversation to be useful.

Together, they may develop an understanding that none of them had individually.

We can get better at being open-minded

Of course, organizational context isn’t the whole story. Individual differences matter too.

Some people are naturally more curious, comfortable with uncertainty or willing to reconsider their assumptions. Others find disagreement threatening, particularly when they feel their expertise or judgment is being challenged. But these tendencies aren’t fixed.

Research on intellectual humility by Leary and colleagues (2017) suggests that recognizing the limits of our knowledge is associated with greater openness to opposing viewpoints.

Emotional maturity matters here. Being able to notice our defensiveness, regulate our reactions and separate disagreement from personal criticism gives us more room to listen.

So does awareness of difference. When we recognize that someone else’s interpretation may be shaped by experiences or information we don’t share, curiosity becomes easier.

These are capabilities we can develop through practice. We can learn to ask what we’re missing, test our assumptions and listen without immediately preparing a rebuttal.

And leaders can help by creating conditions in which people feel able to express differing views. Edmondson’s (1999) research on psychological safety and team learning provides an important foundation for this.

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From individual listening to collective understanding

There’s a further challenge for leaders.

Even when people listen well, they may not realize where their interpretations of the same work differ. A team can leave a meeting believing it has agreed on a priority, while members hold quite different understandings of what that priority means in practice.

That’s the problem we examine at Mirror Mirror.

Our diagnostic methodology compares how people understand their shared work, making differences visible that might otherwise go unnoticed. A structured dialogue then helps teams explore which differences matter, what they can learn from one another and how they want to move forward.

The aim isn’t to make everyone think alike. Nor is it to decide whose perspective is right before the conversation begins.

It’s to give people a better basis for understanding their work together and agreeing on what to do next.

Perhaps that’s also a more useful way to think about open-mindedness.

Not as an obligation to welcome every idea, but as a willingness to recognize that our own view may be incomplete.

Before deciding that someone isn’t listening, shouldn’t we find out what they’re seeing that we’re not?

References

1. Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (1997). Reasoning independently of prior belief and individual differences in actively open-minded thinking. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(2), 342–357.

2. Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage Publications.

3. Kluger, A. N., & Itzchakov, G. (2022). The power of listening at work. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 9, 121–146.

4. Leary, M. R., et al. (2017). Cognitive and interpersonal features of intellectual humility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(6), 793–813.

5. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

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Mirror Mirror™ combines a diagnostic with a structured alignment practice to help organizations coordinate more effectively. It makes differences in how people understand their shared work visible, then helps teams explore which differences matter, develop a clearer shared understanding, and agree on a way forward they can commit to.

What is it?

It has people running through mud, trying to see through fog, pushing things uphill, or reaching for any number of other analogies to describe the struggle of delivering effectively across complex organizational systems.

It creates real problems that keep happening: misunderstood requirements, dropped dependencies, backtracked decisions, unheard needs and missing enablers. It contributes to mediocre results, poor results and costly failures.

It leaves people feeling frustrated, hopeless, and lost. Over time, it contributes to disengagement, coasting, and attrition.

The answer, not all of it, but part of it, is misalignment.

We’ve spent more than a decade getting a handle on this from a people perspective, looking at questions like:

• How does misalignment between people and teams happen?

• How can we measure it?

• What can we do to align and realign?

• How can we build an alignment practice that fits with the pace of work?

What we’ve found is that some degree of misalignment is a normal feature of complex organizational life. Much of it can be worked through. What matters is where it exists, how much it matters and what people do about it.

Our new white paper, Closing Interpretation Gaps: A Framework for Measuring Interpretation Coherence and Developing Coordinated Action Capability, brings together what we have learned with a substantial body of research into how people make sense of complex situations and how groups develop the shared understanding needed to coordinate effectively.

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Looking earlier in the chain

By the time coordination problems become obvious, we tend to have familiar explanations for them. Communication needs improving. Roles need clarifying. Functions need to collaborate better. Leaders need to provide clearer direction.

Any of those things may be true. But our white paper asks whether we should be looking further upstream.

Before people coordinate their actions, they interpret what is happening around them. They decide what matters, what a decision means for their part of the organization, where the risks lie and what needs to happen next. Those interpretations are shaped by different expertise, responsibilities, assumptions and access to information.

This creates something that organizations rarely make visible: interpretation gaps.

From interpretation gaps to coordinated action

The white paper draws together research spanning mental models, sensemaking, social constructionism, shared cognition, team learning, distributed cognition and team effectiveness. Across these different traditions is an important connecting idea: effective coordination depends, in part, on people developing sufficiently compatible understandings of the work they are trying to do together.

We call this interpretation coherence.

It does not mean everybody seeing things in the same way. Differences of perspective, experience and expertise are valuable. The question is whether those differences have been brought together sufficiently for people to understand priorities, responsibilities, dependencies, constraints and trade-offs well enough to coordinate their actions.

That distinction has become increasingly important to our work at Mirror Mirror.

Can we see problems sooner?

Mirror Mirror provides a practical way to explore this. Our diagnostics compare perspectives on real work in progress, making differences in interpretation visible. Teams then work through the differences that matter to build shared clarity around priorities, trade-offs, ownership and the way forward.

The white paper takes this thinking further by asking whether interpretation coherence could become a useful addition to the people analytics toolkit, and potentially a leading indicator of coordination and delivery effectiveness. We are deliberately presenting that as a proposition for further research, rather than a conclusion already proven by the evidence.

For us, that opens up an exciting line of enquiry.

When an organization keeps tying itself in knots, perhaps we should not only ask what has gone wrong. We should also ask what are people seeing differently that is making coordinated action harder than it needs to be?

The core idea

Problem: Interpretation gaps → misalignment → coordination difficulties → delivery risk
Practice: Make differences visible → share and seek perspectives → build shared clarity → agree action

Outcome: Greater interpretation coherence → coordinated action → more responsive, reliable delivery

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If today’s article resonated, you’ll probably enjoy our other writing on coordinating complex work.

Mirror Mirror™ is a methodology that helps people coordinate complex work more effectively. It combines a diagnostic that identifies interpretation gaps on the work in progress, with a structured practice to build shared clarity and improve coordinated action. This helps teams move forward with better ideas and greater confidence.

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When a critical initiative is underway, performance metrics only tell you part of the story. You also need to know whether the people responsible for delivering it are aligned and ready to coordinate effectively together going forward. That matters whether you are introducing AI into operations, delivering a major transformation, or moving a strategic priority from intent into implementation. Performance dashboards may show you how how the work went yesterday. What’s more useful is knowing if people have sufficient shared clarity between them move in the right direction tomorrow.

For specific goals, the question becomes more focused: are the conditions in place for this particular outcome to succeed, where do interpretations differ, and what does the team need to work through?

That has led us to develop a new range of goal-specific Mirror Mirror diagnostics, designed to focus directly on the conditions that matter most for a specific outcome.

From open discovery to focused discovery

For more than a decade, Mirror Mirror diagnostics have taken a deliberately holistic approach. They compare perspectives across strategy, culture, stakeholders, and action to identify interpretation gaps. We do not presume to know where the problem is. The point is to find out.

The underlying methodology has not changed. Mirror Mirror compares how people interpret aspects of their shared work to make important differences visible. This reveals where structured dialogue is needed - the kind of dialogue that explores those differences, finds common ground, and creates sufficient shared clarity for coordinated action.

Our generic diagnostics remain particularly valuable when the question is broad: What is getting in the way of this team working and delivering effectively?

Their holistic scope matters because interpretation gaps are not always where we expect them to be. Something presenting as a delivery problem may have its roots in unclear priorities. Apparently difficult stakeholder relationships may stem from different assumptions about ownership. Teams may be confident that everybody understands the strategy while holding surprisingly different interpretations of how and why priorities need to adjust.

That’s why we measure both the average rating and the coherence of responses. A team can rate something positively overall while revealing considerable variation in how its members see it. Conversely, people may be remarkably coherent in recognizing that something is not working. Those are very different situations requiring different conversations.

Goal-specific diagnostics apply the same principle through a different lens. They ask: what needs to be true for us to succeed at this particular piece of work, and do we see those conditions clearly enough to coordinate around them?

For leaders responsible for a critical outcome, that distinction can be consequential.

Take AI adoption

AI adoption is a good example because there is a great deal more involved than working with technology.

A team may have access to excellent tools and capable technical people, while important differences remain around what AI is actually intended to achieve, where it should and should not be used, who owns AI-enabled changes, how risks should be handled or how learning should influence the approach.

Those differences may remain hidden while implementation appears to be progressing.

The AI Adoption Diagnostic is designed to reveal those differences while there is still time to work with them.

It also explores something we think is fundamental across all the goal-specific diagnostics: readiness to align.

A team needs to the capability to rebuild shared clarity it as conditions change (and they usually do).

• Complex work changes.

• New information arrives.

• Assumptions are challenged.

• Dependencies move.

In these circumstances it’s not about receiving a message or a plan. People need to be able to raise concerns, share information, enquire into other perspectives, work constructively with differences and adapt together.

Our research base is very clear on this point. Team learning behaviours such as information sharing, inquiry, constructive disagreement, co-construction and reflection help groups integrate different perspectives and develop the shared understanding required for coordinated action.

So we are interested in two things at once: how clearly do we see the work now, and how capable are we of realigning as the work changes?

Now consider a critical initiative

The same logic becomes particularly useful when a major strategic change initiative is underway.

Here, the questions become very concrete, for example:

1. Do we have shared clarity on what this initiative needs to achieve?

2. When priorities compete, are we making clear choices about what matters most?

3. Are ownership and dependencies sufficiently clear?

4. Can people raise concerns when risks and trade-offs emerge?

5. Do people follow through on the commitments required to achieve the shared goal?

A conventional project dashboard can tell us a great deal about progress. It cannot readily tell us whether the people responsible for that progress are interpreting the situation in compatible ways.

And that' distinction is crucial.

It’s great when the goal links to strategy and that plans have been set up and distruted, but in amongst all the complexity there are many moving parts. When people interpret even a word differently, like ‘urgent’, like ‘improve’, like ‘quality’; or when they have a fuzzy idea of the context behind decisions made, then their interpretations will vary. The gaps lead to risks, and so it happens: rework, recurring decisions, dependency failures, escalations. All based on decisions and actions that didn’t line up.

That is the gap these focused diagnostics are designed to make visible - in the context of the scope of the specific goal at hand. Without sight on the gaps, most may only become visible only once work is underway. By then, capable people may already have spent considerable time compensating for them.

A focused diagnostic gives a team an opportunity to look upstream and work with those differences before they become delivery problems.

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When to take a broad or focused view

If you want to discover what may be preventing effective coordination, without presuming where the answer lies, our generic diagnostics provide the broader lens.

If you have a significant outcome in front of you, such as AI adoption or delivery of a critical initiative, the goal-specific diagnostics concentrate attention on the conditions most relevant to achieving it.

What makes both approaches distinctive is their focus on interpretation. That reveals a very different picture from a satisfaction survey, project review or performance dashboard. And that’s the opportunity - find out how people see things while there is still time to learn from each other and align.

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If today’s article resonated, you’ll probably enjoy our other writing on coordinating complex work.

Mirror Mirror™ is a coordination methodology that helps organizations coordinate complex strategic work more effectively. It combines a diagnostic that identifies interpretation gaps with a structured coordination practice to build shared clarity, improve coordinated action, and help teams move forward with better ideas and greater confidence.

People Seeing Things Differently Is Not the Problem. Organizations depend on people seeing things differently. Different expertise, Different responsibilities, different information, different experiences.

And we know those differences are not a weakness. Complex work depends on people noticing different risks, opportunities, dependencies and possibilities that others might miss. But it creates a practical challenge for anyone who leads, facilitates, or coaches teams:

How do we help people bring those different interpretations together well enough to coordinate action?

In our experience, the problem is rarely that capable people are unwilling to communicate. More often, people sit in the same meeting, hear the same strategy, review the same plan and leave with surprisingly different interpretations of what matters most.

These are not necessarily disagreements, they are interpretation gaps.

And because they are often invisible, they tend to surface later as friction, duplicated effort, revisited decisions and implementation becoming harder than it needs to be. This is the territory Mirror Mirror™ was designed for.

From conversation to visible data

Mirror Mirror™ gives facilitators and team coaches a structured way to help teams surface and explore differences in how they interpret real work in progress. By bringing those perspectives together, teams build shared clarity, generate better ideas and agree explicit actions they can commit to. The result is less risk of misalignment and stronger, more coordinated delivery.

Our diagnostic compares how members of a team perceive key aspects of their shared work, making differences visible that would otherwise remain hidden. Rather than assuming everyone has the same picture, it provides evidence of where perspectives are already coherent and where important differences deserve exploration.

The dialogue practice then gives teams a disciplined way to work with those differences. People share what they see. They seek to understand the reasoning and experience behind other perspectives. Together they coordinate around sufficient shared clarity to decide what happens next.

The objective is never uniform thinking. Quite the opposite, infact. The value lies in helping teams use different perspectives well enough that diversity contributes to better thinking and more coordinated action.

For many experienced facilitators and coaches, this introduces a different kind of intervention. Instead of focusing primarily on communication quality or interpersonal dynamics, the work becomes helping teams notice and work with the differences in how they are making sense of complex work together.

That is a capability we believe will become increasingly important.

Learning to Guide Team Alignment with Mirror Mirror™

This autumn we are adding two new levels to our existing practitioner training. Both are built around the same methodology, but they serve practitioners at different stages of their development.

Certified Alignment Facilitator Training

One-day live programme for experienced facilitators, coaches, consultants and internal transformation professionals

This programme is designed for people who already work with teams and want to add a practical, evidence-based coordination methodology to their existing practice.

Participants complete pre-work before joining live faculty training, where they learn how to use Mirror Mirror diagnostics, identify interpretation gaps affecting delivery and facilitate structured coordination conversations that help teams build shared clarity and coordinated action.

Upcoming live online dates

• 9 October 2026 — 15.00–21.00

• 12 November 2026 — 15.00–21.00

The training provides a complete introduction to the methodology and equips practitioners to begin applying it in their own organizational or client environments.

Team Alignment Practitioner Programme

Six-month developmental programme beginning 30 September 2026

Our second route is for practitioners who want to develop deeper systemic capability while learning through real client work.

Rather than treating training as something separate from practice, the programme creates a learning laboratory in which participants work with an actual team throughout the six months. Diagnosis, contracting, structured dialogue, supervision, client application and reflection are integrated into one developmental journey.

The cohort itself becomes an important part of the learning experience as practitioners compare observations, explore different interpretations and develop their own facilitation capability together.

The programme begins on 30 September 2026, with live sessions running 13.00–18.00.

Our application for EMCC Global accreditation at Team Coaching Practitioner level is currently pending.

A growing practitioner community

Both programmes are built around one simple principle.

Success depends on what people see — and how well they can work through the differences to coordinate their actions together.

As organizations ask teams to deliver increasingly complex work across functions, competing priorities and changing conditions, practitioners need approaches that go beyond improving conversation alone.

They need ways of helping teams make their different interpretations visible, explore them productively and convert that understanding into coordinated action.

That is the practice we have spent the last decade developing.

If you are an experienced facilitator, coach, consultant or transformation professional and would like to explore whether Mirror Mirror could become part of your practice, we’d love to hear from you.

Contact us to find out more or apply for either programme with your LinkedIn profile.

Thanks for reading!

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Mirror Mirror™ is a coordination methodology that helps organizations coordinate complex strategic work more effectively. It combines a diagnostic that identifies interpretation gaps with a structured coordination practice to build shared clarity, improve coordinated action, and help teams move forward with better ideas and greater confidence.

Everyone says they want alignment, but we’ve yet to meet a team that sets out hoping decisions will be revisited, priorities will become muddled, or people will work hard while somehow pulling in different directions. Yet we continue to see exactly these patterns across organizations of every size.

Misalignment is often a consequence of perfectly normal organizational habits. They seem sensible in the moment but create the conditions for interpretation gaps to emerge. Unless those gaps are worked through, they can compound into coordination problems, unnecessary rework and slower delivery. By the time anyone notices, the consequences are already visible.

Over the years, I’ve seen enough of these patterns to stand by what amounts to the same seven habits that make misalignment remarkably predictable. None is especially dramatic, most are understandable and all are avoidable.

We mistake communication for shared understanding

One assumption sits behind an extraordinary amount of organizational life: if we’ve communicated something clearly and nobody objects, we assume people must have understood it in the same way. The strategy was presented, the decision was explained, the email went out and everyone nodded. From the outside, that looks like alignment.

I don’t think that’s how people actually work. We don’t simply receive information; we interpret it through our own experience, responsibilities, expertise and immediate pressures in ways that make sense to us. The same presentation, strategy document or leadership briefing can therefore leave ten people holding ten subtly different pictures of what matters, what was decided and what they are expected to do next.

If those differences are not explored, people start acting on their own interpretations. The instinct when coordination problems appear is often to communicate again: another meeting, another presentation, another update. Yet information itself is rarely the missing ingredient. More often, the missing piece is discovering how differently people interpreted what was communicated in the first place. Shared understanding should never be assumed simply because communication has taken place.

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We move past ambiguity instead of resolving it

Complex organizations will always face uncertainty. Markets move, customers change their minds, technology develops and decisions have to be made before every fact is known. That comes with the territory.

What surprises me is how often teams also tolerate ambiguity that could easily have been resolved. A phrase goes unexplored, a responsibility remains slightly unclear, or a decision is accepted even though people have attached different meanings to it. Nobody stops the discussion because everyone wants to keep the work moving. Occasionally ambiguity may even suit someone whose preferred interpretation serves their own agenda, but more often it is simply left unattended.

These moments can seem insignificant, especially in a packed meeting with more urgent matters waiting. Collectively, however, they create fertile ground for interpretation gaps to grow. There is an important difference between the ambiguity organizations have to navigate and the ambiguity they could have prevented. The latter deserves much more attention.

We reward speed before coherence

Organizations celebrate momentum. Rapid decision-making, quick delivery and visible progress are all worthwhile ambitions, but the pressure to keep moving can encourage teams to act before they have developed enough shared clarity about where they are heading together.

Exceptionally busy teams can run efficient meetings, make decisions quickly and keep work flowing. Yet when they pause to compare perspectives, they sometimes discover that people have been moving in different directions or even working against one another without realizing it. That raises a useful question: if the team had spent a little longer aligning at the point of decision, would the outcome ultimately have been reached faster?

Speed creates value when people are well coordinated. Without sufficient coherence, it can simply get different interpretations into the system more quickly, where they become harder and more expensive to resolve.

We assume capable people see the same situation

One assumption we encounter repeatedly is that expertise naturally creates alignment. In reality, capable people can look at exactly the same situation and reach quite different interpretations, precisely because of what they know. A finance director notices financial exposure, an operations leader sees dependencies and capacity constraints, while a technology lead may be thinking about feasibility, architecture and longer-term consequences. Each is making sense of the situation through a different combination of expertise, experience, responsibilities and access to information.

This is valuable. Organizations need these differences because they reveal risks, possibilities and consequences that no single person could see alone. The problem arises when we assume that putting capable people in the same meeting, showing them the same information and agreeing on the same broad goal means they now see the situation in sufficiently similar ways to coordinate their actions. Often, nobody has actually compared what they understood, what they consider most important, or which assumptions are driving their conclusions.

In complex work, expertise therefore creates an interesting tension. The more specialized the people involved, the richer the perspectives available to the organization, but also the greater the potential for important differences in interpretation. Alignment depends on making productive use of those differences rather than assuming expertise has somehow removed them.

We confuse agreement with alignment

Perhaps the most common misunderstanding we encounter is the belief that alignment means everyone thinking the same way. The research gives us good reasons to reject that idea. Work on shared cognition shows that effective coordination depends on sufficiently compatible understandings of tasks, goals and roles, rather than identical thinking (Cannon-Bowers & Salas, 2001). Research on strategic decision-making also shows the value of dissent and constructive debate, with teams benefiting when different views are examined rather than suppressed (Schweiger, Sandberg, & Ragan, 1986; Eisenhardt, Kahwajy, & Bourgeois, 1997).

This matters because agreement on views and opinions is neither realistic nor always desirable. A team can disagree strongly about the merits of a proposal, the scale of a risk or the best interpretation of what has happened, while still reaching a clear decision and committing to what happens next. Alignment, in that sense, requires enough shared understanding of the context and explicit agreement on action. It does not require people to surrender the perspectives that helped the team reach a better decision in the first place.

The strongest leadership teams we’ve supported rarely agree on everything. They challenge each other, question assumptions and bring different viewpoints into the room. What distinguishes them is their ability to work those differences through until priorities, trade-offs, ownership and next steps are sufficiently clear for coordinated action. Their perspectives can remain different while their actions become coherent.

We treat alignment as an event

Many organizations approach alignment as something that can be achieved once. A strategy day, an off-site, a town hall or a kick-off meeting ends with a set of agreed intentions and, for a moment at least, alignment gets a satisfying tick.

Those moments matter, but the work does not stand still afterwards. Priorities evolve, new information emerges, teams change, customers behave differently and technology reshapes assumptions. A decision that made perfect sense three months ago may be interpreted differently once implementation reveals constraints that were not visible at the outset.

If interpretation is constantly evolving, alignment cannot be static. It has to become an ongoing capability through which teams compare perspectives, revisit important assumptions and renew shared clarity as the work develops. The organizations that sustain alignment are rarely those that held the best strategy session. They are the ones that have developed disciplined ways to keep making sense of changing work together.

We wait until delivery problems force the conversation

This is perhaps the most expensive habit of all. Many organizations only begin exploring alignment after delivery has already started to suffer. By then, interpretation gaps may have been influencing decisions for weeks or months. Deadlines slip, stakeholders become frustrated, escalations increase and relationships between teams become strained. Under that pressure, people are also less inclined to spend time examining how the problem arose because the immediate priority is to fix it.

I think of many of these delivery problems as symptoms rather than root causes. A dependency failure may have started with two teams holding different assumptions about who was responsible. A decision that keeps returning to the leadership team may never have translated into sufficiently explicit ownership. A strategic priority that appears to be losing momentum may have acquired different meanings as it travelled through the organization.

The earlier these differences are discovered, the easier they are to work through. Once they become embedded in plans, processes, commitments and stakeholder expectations, resolving them becomes considerably more costly.

A final thought

Looking back across these seven habits, what strikes me is how ordinary they are. None reflects poor intent. Most are understandable responses to the pressures of modern organizational life. Yet together they create the conditions for interpretation gaps to accumulate until coordination begins to break down.

I suspect many organizations spend too much time trying to improve outward communication and not enough time enabling the interpersonal sense-making that has to happen around it. A more useful question is: are we actually interpreting this work in sufficiently similar ways to coordinate our actions?

For me, that is where alignment begins. It requires people to make their interpretations visible, compare perspectives before differences become delivery problems and develop enough shared clarity to move forward together. We do not need everybody to think alike. We do need to know that capable people, with all the value their different perspectives bring, can turn those perspectives into coordinated action.

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References

Cannon-Bowers, J. A., & Salas, E. (2001). Reflections on shared cognition. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22(2), 195–202.

Eisenhardt, K. M., Kahwajy, J. L., & Bourgeois, L. J. III. (1997). How management teams can have a good fight. Harvard Business Review, 75(4), 77–85.

Schweiger, D. M., Sandberg, W. R., & Ragan, J. W. (1986). Group approaches for improving strategic decision making: A comparative analysis of dialectical inquiry, devil’s advocacy, and consensus. Academy of Management Journal, 29(1), 51–71.

About Mirror Mirror™

Mirror Mirror™ is a coordination methodology that helps organizations coordinate complex strategic work more effectively. It combines a diagnostic that identifies interpretation gaps with a structured coordination practice to build shared clarity, improve coordinated action and help teams move forward with better ideas and greater confidence.

Words such as alignment, agreement, consensus, and coherence are often used interchangeably. Yet many organizations invest enormous time and money trying to improve alignment without first defining it. That’s more than a semantic problem. It shapes what leaders measure, what they notice, and ultimately what they try to improve.

Over the past decade, our work has centred on a simple observation. Teams rarely struggle because they lack capable or committed people. More often, they struggle because capable people interpret the same situation in different ways, while believing they are working from the same understanding. By the time they become visible, they have already begun to affect decisions, ownership, dependencies, priorities, and delivery (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Weick, 1995).

These distinctions matter because they influence how organizations diagnose coordination problems and the interventions they choose.

• Agreement is the simplest concept. It means reaching the same conclusion or holding the same opinion. Agreement has obvious value, but agreement alone tells us very little about whether people have interpreted the situation in compatible ways. Two people may agree that a project is the highest priority while holding completely different assumptions about why it matters, what success looks like, who owns the critical decisions, or which trade-offs should be made along the way. The agreement is genuine. The interpretations beneath it are not. Those differences usually remain invisible until the work begins (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Weick, 1995; Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

• Consensus should never be mistaken for coordinated action. Teams often leave meetings believing they have reached consensus, only to discover weeks later that implementation has drifted in several directions. The decision was shared. Its meaning was not. Research on senior leadership teams shows that executives routinely operate with different information and different interests, making deliberate processes for surfacing and integrating perspectives essential for effective decision making (Edmondson, Roberto, & Watkins, 2003).

• Conformity introduces a different dynamic altogether. Here, people suppress differences instead of working through them. Meetings become quieter. Questions disappear. Challenges remain unspoken. From the outside, this can look remarkably efficient because conflict has apparently vanished. In reality, the opposite is often happening. Different interpretations continue to develop, but they are no longer being explored. The appearance of alignment improves while the foundations of coordination weaken (Janis, 1982; Edmondson, 1999) .

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The distinction between coherence and convergence is equally important.

• Convergence suggests that perspectives gradually become more alike. That sounds attractive until we remember that organizations depend on diversity of expertise. Engineers, commercial leaders, and operational specialists should not see the world identically. Their different perspectives are precisely what allows organizations to solve complex problems. The objective is not to eliminate variation but to integrate it.

• Coherence describes the extent to which different perspectives fit together well enough to support coordinated action.Teams become capable of acting together without thinking alike. Diversity is preserved while shared clarity is strengthened (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1993; Woolley et al., 2010).

Mirror Mirror uses the term interpretation coherence to describe the degree to which people have developed sufficiently compatible interpretations of their shared work to enable coordinated action. We propose it as an integrative construct that brings together ideas from research on mental models, sensemaking, shared cognition, team learning, distributed cognition and team effectiveness. Rather than replacing these established bodies of work, interpretation coherence provides a practical way of understanding and measuring how compatible people’s interpretations have become as work unfolds, so they can coordinate action effectively (Cannon-Bowers, Salas, & Converse, 1993; Mohammed et al., 2010; Van den Bossche et al., 2006; Mathieu et al., 2019).

That distinction explains another pair of terms that are often confused: strategic alignment and team alignment.

• Strategic alignment is concerned with ensuring that the organization’s goals, priorities, resources, and activities support its overall strategic direction. It establishes intent and a common direction of travel.

• Team alignment is the ongoing capability through which teams develop interpretation coherence so they can coordinate action as work unfolds. It begins when strategic intent is translated into real work.

The work of Mirror Mirror treats strategic alignment and team alignment as related but distinct because organizations routinely communicate strategy successfully while still struggling to coordinate its implementation (Weick, 1995; Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001; Mathieu et al., 2019).

Perhaps the most important misunderstanding of all concerns alignment itself.

Traditional definitions often describe alignment as a state. In practice, complex organizations experience continual change. New information emerges, priorities evolve, teams reorganize, and fresh interpretations develop. Every change creates new opportunities for people to construct different interpretations of what is happening around them. Interpretation gaps are therefore not unusual exceptions. They are an inevitable consequence of complex work (Weick, 1995; Hutchins, 1995; Mathieu et al., 2019).

• Alignment is an ongoing practice of developing shared clarity rather than a condition that can simply be achieved and maintained. Seen through this lens, it becomes an organizational capability rather than a permanent state.

A final distinction

• System Alignment: Jonathan Trevor uses the term alignment to describe the fit between the major elements of an organization, including its purpose, strategy, structure, operating model, culture, capabilities, and governance. This systems perspective is well established because organizations perform better when these components reinforce one another.

Even when an organization is well aligned as a system, people still need to interpret strategic intent as work unfolds. The challenge therefore shifts from organizational design to collective sensemaking: how teams compare interpretations, develop shared clarity, and coordinate action. The two perspectives are complementary rather than competing.

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Definitions at a Glance:

• Agreement is reaching the same conclusion or holding the same opinion. It does not necessarily mean people have interpreted the situation in the same way.

• Consensus is collective support for a decision. It creates commitment to a direction but does not guarantee that people share the same understanding of what that decision means in practice.

• Conformity is the suppression of different perspectives to preserve apparent harmony. It reduces visible disagreement but often allows hidden interpretation gaps to persist.

• Convergence is the gradual movement of perspectives towards one another. While sometimes helpful, organizations rarely need identical thinking and should not seek it at the expense of diversity.

• Coherence is the degree to which different perspectives fit together well enough to support coordinated action. It preserves diversity while strengthening shared clarity.

• Systems alignment is the degree to which the major elements of an organization, including its purpose, strategy, structure, operating model, culture, governance, capabilities, and processes, reinforce one another. It focuses on designing the organization so its parts work together coherently in support of its strategic objectives.

• Strategic alignment is the process of translating strategic intent into objectives, priorities, and initiatives that guide the organization in a common direction.

• Interpretation coherence – Mirror Mirror’s proposed construct describing the degree to which people have developed sufficiently compatible interpretations of their shared work to enable coordinated action.

• Team alignment – The ongoing practice through which teams develop and renew interpretation coherence as work unfolds.

• Alignment – The broader organizational capability of continually developing shared clarity to sustain coordinated action in changing environments.

Mirror Mirror’s contribution is not to replace the rich bodies of research that already exist around mental models, sensemaking, shared cognition, team learning, distributed cognition or team effectiveness. Rather, it is to propose interpretation coherence as an integrative, practical construct that connects these perspectives through a repeatable team alignment practice.

When leaders begin to distinguish these ideas, the conversation changes. They stop asking whether everyone agrees. They stop assuming consensus guarantees coordination. They become less interested in apparent harmony and more interested in whether people have developed sufficiently compatible interpretations to move important work forward together.

That is a subtle shift in language.

It is also a profound shift in practice.

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Author’s note: The concept of interpretation coherence developed in this article is proposed as an integrative construct that brings together insights from research on mental models, sensemaking, shared cognition, team learning, distributed cognition, and team effectiveness. A fuller theoretical treatment is presented in the forthcoming white paper, Closing Interpretation Gaps: A Framework for Measuring Interpretation Coherence and Developing Coordinated Action Capability (Uittenbogaard, October 2026).

REFERENCES

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. Anchor Books.

Cannon-Bowers, J. A., Salas, E., & Converse, S. A. (1993). Shared mental models in expert team decision making. In N. J. Castellan Jr. (Ed.), Individual and Group Decision Making: Current Issues (pp. 221–246). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

Edmondson, A. C., Roberto, M. A., & Watkins, M. D. (2003). A dynamic model of top management team effectiveness: Managing unstructured task streams. The Leadership Quarterly, 14(3), 297–325.

Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press.

Janis, I. L. (1982). Groupthink (2nd ed.). Houghton Mifflin.

Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental Models. Cambridge University Press.

Marks, M. A., Mathieu, J. E., & Zaccaro, S. J. (2001). A temporally based framework and taxonomy of team processes. Academy of Management Review, 26(3), 356–376.

Mathieu, J. E., Gallagher, P. T., Domingo, M. A., & Klock, E. A. (2019). Embracing complexity: Reviewing the past decade of team effectiveness research. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 6, 17–46.

Mohammed, S., Ferzandi, L., & Hamilton, K. (2010). Metaphor no more: A 15-year review of the team mental model construct. Journal of Management, 36(4), 876–910.

Van den Bossche, P., Gijselaers, W. H., Segers, M., & Kirschner, P. A. (2006). Social and cognitive factors driving teamwork in collaborative learning environments. Small Group Research, 37(5), 490–521.

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage Publications.

Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330 (6004), 686–688.

If today’s article resonated, you’ll probably enjoy our other writing on coordinating complex work.

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Mirror Mirror™ is a coordination methodology that helps organizations coordinate complex strategic work more effectively. It combines a diagnostic that identifies interpretation gaps with a structured coordination practice to build shared clarity, improve coordinated action, and help teams move forward with better ideas and greater confidence.

One of the things I enjoy most about researching alignment is noticing how different fields of study often arrive at similar conclusions.

Over the years, I have found myself repeatedly returning to the work of two management scholars: Amy Edmondson and Kathleen Eisenhardt. On the surface, they seem to occupy different worlds but the connection is undeniable.

Amy Edmondson, is best known for her work on psychological safety, team learning, and organizational learning. Kathleen Eisenhardt is known for her work on fast decision-making, strategic leadership, and organizations operating in rapidly changing environments.

One is often associated with learning. The otherwith strategy. Yet the more I read their work, the more I think they were both wrestling with the same underlying question.

How do groups of intelligent people make good decisions when nobody has the full picture?

Interestingly, both began their professional lives as engineers before moving into management research. Perhaps that shared foundation partly explains their interest in how complex systems function under uncertainty.

Different disciplines. Similar Conclusions.

Eisenhardt’s landmark paper, Making Fast Strategic Decisions in High-Velocity Environments, was published in 1989. In it, she challenged the conventional belief that good strategic decisions require exhaustive analysis and lengthy deliberation. Studying technology companies operating in turbulent markets, she found that the highest-performing executive teams often made decisions quickly while still maintaining quality. The secret was not speed alone. It was their ability to bring multiple perspectives into the discussion, debate vigorously, use real operational data, and reach closure without becoming trapped in endless analysis.

Fourteen years later, in 2003, Edmondson, together with Michael Roberto and Michael Watkins, published A Dynamic Model of Top Management Team Effectiveness. Rather than focusing on demographics or leadership traits, they examined the situations leadership teams face and introduced an idea that I believe deserves far more attention today: asymmetries of information and interests that naturally exist inside leadership teams.

Their observation was deceptively simple. Senior leadership teams do not face a single, stable task. They face what the authors described as an “unstructured task stream” of constantly changing strategic issues.

As those issues change, so does the distribution of information across the team.

• The finance leader knows things others do not know.

• The operations leader sees implementation realities invisible to the rest of the group.

• The commercial leader understands customer pressures that others may never encounter directly.

At the same time, interests are not always perfectly aligned. Leaders represent functions, resources, priorities, and constituencies. Even when everyone wants organizational success, they may hold different views on how that success should be achieved.

This is where I think the connection between Edmondson and Eisenhardt becomes fascinating.

Edmondson helps explain why coordination becomes difficult.
Eisenhardt helps explain how high-performing teams respond.

The first tells us that complex organizations naturally generate fragmented information and competing perspectives.

The second shows us that successful executive teams do not eliminate these differences. They create ways of working that allow them to be integrated.

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When communication isn’t the problem

This is important because I increasingly think many organizations diagnose the wrong problem.

When delivery becomes difficult, when strategic initiatives drift, when decisions circle back around, or when leaders repeatedly find themselves clarifying the same issues, the instinctive response is often to focus on communication.

• Perhaps people need more updates.

• Perhaps the strategy was not communicated clearly enough.

• Perhaps another meeting is needed.

Sometimes that is true (often it is not). Communication certainly matters, but coordination problems run deeper.

The challenge is that people are operating from different realities. They possess different information, see different constraints, hold different assumptions. They are interpreting the same situation through different lenses. More communication alone does not solve that problem because it does not address the different interpretations people are already working from.Both Eisenhardt and Edmondson arrived at remarkably similar conclusions from different starting points and only fourteen years apart. One approached the issue from strategy. The other approached it from organizational learning.

Both concluded that organizational effectiveness depends on a team’s ability to work productively with difference.The challenge is not eliminating difference. It is creating ways for different perspectives to work together productively.

Coordination through shared clarity

For me, this is one of the most important implications for leaders operating in today’s environment. As organizations become larger, more specialized, more interconnected, and more geographically distributed, asymmetries of information and interpretation become inevitable. Diversity of perspective becomes both a strategic asset and a coordination challenge.

The organizations that thrive under these conditions are unlikely to be those that achieve perfect agreement. They are more likely to be those that consistently create enough shared clarity to coordinate action despite their differences.

Edmondson and Eisenhardt remind us that the central challenge of leadership is helping those who see the world differently, move forward together.

That requires more than sharing information. It requires creating the shared conditions where different perspectives can be surfaced, assumptions explored, and enough shared clarity built for coordinated action to follow.

References:

Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Making Fast Strategic Decisions in High-Velocity Environments. Academy of Management Journal.

Eisenhardt, K. M., & Sull, D. N. (2001). Strategy as Simple Rules. Harvard Business Review.

Eisenhardt, K. M. (1988). Speed and Strategic Choice: How Managers Accelerate Decision Making. California Management Review.

If today’s article resonated, you’ll probably enjoy our other writing on coordinating complex work.

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Mirror Mirror™ is a coordination methodology that helps organizations coordinate complex strategic work more effectively. It combines a diagnostic that identifies interpretation gaps before they become delivery issues with a structured coordination practice that builds shared clarity, strengthens coordinated action, and helps teams move priority work forward with better ideas and greater confidence.

Hi,

Over the past few months we’ve had a growing number of conversations with leaders, coaches, consultants, and transformation professionals who are curious about Mirror Mirror, interested in the ideas, or simply want to hear how others react to the approach.

So we’ve decided to open up a regular monthly conversation.

On the last Monday of each month at 3pm CET, I’ll be joined by our Head of Practice, John Hill, and Associate Team Member Craig Howe, along with anyone who would like to drop in, meet some peers, hear a little more about Mirror Mirror, and discuss how the ideas land in practice.

There is no presentation and no sales pitch. Just a relaxed discussion about coordinated action, shared clarity, and the challenges organizations face as complexity increases.

Our next Open Discovery Call is on Monday 29 June at 3pm CET.

If you’d like to join us, simply send us the email address to use and we’ll add you to the calendar invitation.

Hope to see some of you there.

Lindsay Uittenbogaard Founder, Mirror Mirror

Think about the last organizational change you experienced. Leaders described the same vision, shared the same presentations, and communicated the same objectives. Yet some people saw an exciting opportunity, others saw a threat, some interpreted it as a major transformation, while others assumed very little would change at all.

Months later, people were still behaving according to entirely different assumptions about what the change was supposed to achieve.

This is where neurodiversity becomes more than an inclusion conversation. Everyone has a neurological profile and some are labelled. Yet every one of us interprets information, forms assumptions, and reaches conclusions in our own way.

That raises a practical question for teams and leaders: what happens to alignment when people do not interpret the same situation in the same way?

The myth of shared understanding

It is easy to explain these situations away as communication failures, poor listening, or a lack of alignment. But something deeper is often going on. Organizations consistently underestimate how differently human beings experience and interpret the same reality. Much of modern work is built upon an assumption that shared understanding emerges naturally. We attend the same meeting, hear the same presentation, read the same strategy document, and therefore should arrive at broadly similar conclusions. Yet decades of research suggest otherwise.

Human beings do not passively receive information. We actively construct meaning from it. Our brains continuously update mental models based on experience, prior knowledge, emotions, assumptions, and context. We receive fragmented inputs, connect them to existing beliefs, and generate interpretations that feel logical and coherent to us. When information is incomplete, ambiguous, or complex, we naturally fill in the gaps ourselves.

The result is that two intelligent people can encounter exactly the same situation and emerge with entirely different understandings of what happened. This is not a flaw in human thinking. It is how human thinking works. As Karl Weick’s research on sensemaking demonstrated, people are constantly constructing meaning in order to make the world understandable. Reality is not simply observed; it is interpreted.

We do not experience reality in the same way

This is one reason the growing conversation around neurodiversity is so important. Neurodiversity is often discussed in relation to individuals whose cognitive differences are visible enough to receive labels such as ADHD, autism, dyslexia, or dyspraxia. These conversations matter enormously and have helped organizations become more inclusive.

However, neurodiversity also points toward a broader truth. Everyone has a neurological profile. Every person processes information differently, regulates attention differently, tolerates ambiguity differently, notices different signals, and prioritizes different aspects of the same situation. Some people think verbally, others visually. Some process rapidly and intuitively, while others prefer deeper reflection and analysis. Some require extensive context before acting, while others are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information.

The labelled profiles are not the exception to the rule. They simply make visible a reality that exists across all human cognition. Diverse perspectives become particularly important when people work together. Research on diversity consistently shows that differing perspectives improve creativity, innovation, and problem solving. Scott Page argued that cognitive diversity often allows groups to outperform more homogeneous teams because people bring different heuristics, experiences, and approaches to the same challenge. Similarly, Phillips and colleagues found that diverse groups tend to question assumptions more rigorously and consider a wider range of possibilities.

Yet diversity also creates friction. People interpret situations differently. They disagree on causes, priorities, risks, and solutions. Leonard-Barton’s work on creative abrasion highlighted that innovation often emerges from precisely this kind of productive tension. Diversity creates better thinking, but it does not automatically create shared understanding. In fact, diversity increases the need for deliberate efforts to build it.

Most people have experienced what misalignment feels like, even if they have never used that word. It can feel frustrating when something appears obvious to you but not to others. It can feel exhausting when you explain an idea repeatedly and discover that people keep interpreting it differently. It can feel isolating when nobody else seems concerned about the issue you believe is most important. It can feel confusing when a group appears to agree in a meeting but behaves as though entirely different decisions were made afterwards.

These experiences are often interpreted as interpersonal problems. Yet many are actually interpretive problems. They emerge because people are constructing meaning differently, often without realizing it. Inside organizations, those interpretation gaps affect how people make decisions, set priorities, take ownership, and coordinate action.

Alignment as a capability

The encouraging news is that alignment is not about eliminating these differences. In fact, trying to make people think the same way would remove much of the value that diversity creates. Alignment is better understood as a capability that helps different perspectives work together productively.

Research into team learning behaviours has repeatedly shown that teams perform better when they actively exchange perspectives, challenge assumptions, reflect together, and build shared understanding. This requires more than communication. It requires psychological safety so people feel able to express uncertainty. It requires emotional maturity to hear alternative viewpoints without becoming defensive. It requires productive conflict so differences can be explored rather than suppressed. It requires dialogue skills that allow people to become genuinely curious about how others see the world. And it requires resilience and adaptability because understanding is never finished.

As work changes, contexts evolve, and new information emerges, alignment requires continuous attention rather than one-off interventions. The work is to build enough shared clarity for coordinated action while preserving the difference that helps teams think better.

The real lesson from neurodiversity

Perhaps the most important lesson from neurodiversity is not about those whose cognitive differences are most visible. It is about all of us. Every team is already cognitively diverse. Every conversation contains interpretation gaps. Every organization depends upon people creating shared understanding across different experiences, assumptions, and ways of thinking.

The myth is that understanding exists automatically. The reality is that understanding must be built.

Alignment, therefore, is not about agreement. It is not about persuading everyone to see the world in the same way. It is the ongoing practice of helping different minds coordinate effectively despite never experiencing reality in exactly the same way. The organizations that recognize this will not eliminate differences. They will learn how to benefit from them.

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References

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. Anchor Books.

Leonard-Barton, D. (1995). Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation. Harvard Business School Press.

Page, S. E. (2007). The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Princeton University Press.

Phillips, K. W., Liljenquist, K. A., & Neale, M. A. (2010). Is the Pain Worth the Gain? The Advantages and Liabilities of Agreeing With Socially Distinct Newcomers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage Publications.

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Mirror Mirror™ is a data-driven alignment practice that helps organizations coordinate complex strategic work more effectively. It identifies interpretation gaps before they become delivery issues, and enables greater shared clarity, responsiveness, and follow-through.

Using focused diagnostics and structured dialogue around real work in progress, teams build shared clarity on priorities, ownership, dependencies, and next steps. This improves coordinated delivery and responsiveness under pressure while helping teams move priority work forward with better ideas and greater confidence.

Strategy implementation is becoming harder, even inside capable organizations. Teams with strong leadership, sophisticated systems, clear strategies, and experienced people still find themselves dealing with implementation issues, cross-functional friction, recurring escalation cycles, and decisions that resurface after appearing settled. Why?

Traditional management thinking largely assumes that if organizations put the right structures, processes, better communication, and leadership in place, effective coordination follows.

Modern operating conditions are exposing the limits of that assumption.

Because even highly capable organizations continue to experience coordination breakdowns that are difficult to explain through capability, effort, or intent alone.

This makes John Mathieu’s work on team effectiveness and complexity increasingly important. Mathieu is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Management at the University of Connecticut (UConn), and the GE Professor in Business at UConn. In 2019, together with his team Peter T. Gallagher, Monique A. Domingo, and Elizabeth A. Klock, he published a paper entitled ‘Embracing Complexity: Reviewing the Past Decade of Team Effectiveness Research’.

The paper reframes coordination in and between teams as something fluid and continuously evolving. It sees team performance as emergent through ongoing, high-quality interactions between changing priorities, fragmented information, evolving relationships, and operational pressures.

It concludes that teams are better understood as dynamic systems functioning inside constantly evolving conditions of complexity, ambiguity, interdependence, and change.

“Teams are increasingly being conceptualized as dynamic networks of activities that reside in a multilevel context and coevolving with environmental variables.”

The challenge of coordination under complexity

This changes the nature of the coordination challenge to be an ongoing adaptive process in which shared clarity is regularly rebuilt as the work and context evolves.

Teams are now operating under conditions of constant adjustment. Priorities shift, constraints emerge, information arrives unevenly, and coordination increasingly depends on work moving across specialised functions and interdependent systems.

As complexity grows, different parts of the organization begin interpreting the same situation in different ways. Teams form different views of priorities, constraints, risks, ownership, and next actions.

Mathieu’s work does not frame this divergence as dysfunction, noting that variation in perspective is often a natural consequence of specialization, expertise, diversity, and distributed operational awareness.

The challenge emerges when organizations lack sufficient mechanisms to surface, compare, and work through those differences before they grow into coordination issues.

This is where Mathieu’s work becomes especially useful in practice.

Team effectiveness depends heavily on how information is exchanged, how assumptions are surfaced, how safe people feel raising concerns, and how teams coordinate as conditions evolve.

Performance is heavily influenced by whether teams possess the mechanisms needed to continuously integrate fragmented information, update collective understanding, and adapt coherently as circumstances change.

Poor coordination at play

This increasingly reflects operational reality inside organizations.

• Coordination problems rarely begin as obvious failures. They often begin as small interpretation gaps that remain invisible while work continues moving forward.

• One team believes priorities have shifted, while another assumes they remain stable.

• One function interprets a strategic decision as directional, while another treats it as finalized.

• One group believes ownership has transferred, while another assumes responsibility still sits elsewhere.

In isolation, none of these differences appear especially serious. But over time, they accumulate into duplicated effort, conflicting delivery patterns, dependency breakdowns, recurring escalations, and delivery instability despite capable people working hard throughout the system.

Research by Amy Edmondson, Michael Roberto, and Michael Watkins reinforces this perspective. Their work on top management teams describes leadership environments as “unstructured task streams” characterized by continuous flows of overlapping, ambiguous, and evolving situations rather than stable, discrete tasks.

Under these conditions, executives naturally hold different information, priorities, and situational interpretations shaped by their roles and operational exposure.

The research shows that when these asymmetries remain unmanaged, decision quality and coordination deteriorate over time.

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Coordination as a strategic capability

One conclusion is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: coordination itself is becoming a strategic capability.

Organizations are now operating under conditions where AI acceleration, distributed work, transformation pressure, regulatory complexity, and faster operating rhythms all increase the amount of interpretation required inside the system.

Teams are processing more fragmented inputs, across more dependencies, and at greater speed than ever before. Human sensemaking capacity has not accelerated at the same rate.

People still interpret reality through mental models shaped by prior experience, local context, incentives, assumptions, and incomplete information. The result is that organizations increasingly experience situations where speed outpaces shared clarity.

This changes how alignment needs to be understood.

Interpretation gaps are natural features of organizational life under complexity. Alignment is a practice that builds shared clarity on what is and what next. Coordinated action is the outcome.

‘Alignment’ does not mean eliminating difference or reaching unanimous agreement. The operational requirement is far more practical: creating enough shared clarity for coordinated action to remain possible as conditions change, even when underlying perspectives may differ.

The critical question is whether organizations possess deliberate mechanisms for making those gaps visible and workable before they evolve into operational instability.

What organizations need now

If team effectiveness depends on continuously rebuilding shared understanding under changing conditions, organizations require coordination practices that operate inside the real work itself.

That includes structured methods for comparing perspectives, clarifying assumptions, surfacing dependency risks, and translating fragmented interpretations into coherent coordinated action.

This is where the practical implications of Mathieu’s work become more relevant. He advocates that increasingly, organizational performance depends on how effectively teams maintain coordination as conditions continue changing around them.

The organizations that adapt fastest will be those able to continuously rebuild shared clarity as complexity evolves. Alignment is therefore not just a practice, but a capability.

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References

Edmondson, A. C., Roberto, M. A., & Watkins, M. D. (2003). A dynamic model of top management team effectiveness: Managing unstructured task streams. The Leadership Quarterly, 14(3), 297–325.

Mathieu, J. E., Gallagher, P. T., Domingo, M. A., & Klock, E. A. (2019). Embracing complexity: Reviewing the past decade of team effectiveness research. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 6, 17–46.

Van den Bossche, P., Gijselaers, W. H., Segers, M., & Kirschner, P. A. (2006). Social and cognitive factors driving teamwork in collaborative learning environments. Team Learning Beliefs and Behaviors literature.

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage Publications.

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. Doubleday.

Mirror Mirror™ is a coordination methodology for complex organizations. It makes differences in interpretation visible and workable before they compound into friction, delays, or implementation drift.

Using focused diagnostics and structured dialogue around real work in progress, teams build shared clarity on priorities, ownership, dependencies, and next steps. This improves coordinated delivery and responsiveness under pressure while helping teams move priority work forward with better ideas and greater confidence.

AI is changing the experience of teaming inside organizations faster than most leaders are willing to admit. While attention is mostly focused on productivity gains, AI is accelerating work faster than people can build shared clarity around it, and that creates a serious coordination risk.

Organizations rarely fail because people lack intelligence. They fail when coordination breaks down between people operating with competing interpretations of priorities, ownership, and success. AI does not remove those pressures. In many cases, it intensifies them.

Scenario 1: More answers, less time to think together

Right now, organizations all over the world are integrating AI into everyday work. Individuals can generate more analysis, recommendations, summaries, presentations, and strategic options than ever before, yet the mechanisms through which organizations review, challenge, prioritize, and coordinate those outputs are not speeding up at the same rate.

Atlassian recently described this dynamic as the “AI Efficiency Paradox,” observing that AI can make individuals dramatically faster while the gains leak away through reviews, handoffs, and decisions long before they reach customers.

AI is mostly speeding up individual work: drafting, coding, and analysis. Yet on most teams, those activities make up only a fraction of the lifecycle. The bulk of the time is still spent on human collaboration and process: reviews, decisions, sign‑offs, risk checks, and alignment across teams… We are currently witnessing a 43% gap between ‘felt’ speed and actual output, where individual efficiency gains are being swallowed by the friction of team-level handoffs.

People adapt rationally to this pressure because nobody wants to become the bottleneck. Discussions compress, reviews become lighter-touch, and assumptions go less challenged because there is simply too much material moving through the system to properly interrogate everything in depth.

Initially this feels energizing. Over time, organizations become simultaneously faster and less coherent.

Fast-growth companies already struggle to keep onboarding up to date for new arrivals. Many cross-functional initiatives already contain competing definitions of success. Transformation programs already struggle to reduce ambiguity around ownership and priorities.

AI accelerates all of these coordination pressures.

The constraint is no longer how quickly work gets produced. It is how effectively organizations can make sense of it together.

Scenario 2: AI becomes the coordination structure

Some organizations are now asking a much bigger question: not how AI can support existing structures, but whether AI itself should become the coordination structure.

One example is Block, which is funded by Sequoia, and describes its ambition as building “a company built as an intelligence.” The idea is that if organizational activity becomes fully machine-readable, then AI systems may increasingly perform the coordination work historically carried out by management layers.

Block is remote-first. Everything we do creates artifacts. Decisions, discussions, code, designs, plans, problems, and progress all exist as recorded actions. It's the raw material for a company world model. In a traditional company, a manager's job is to know what's happening across their team and relay that context up and down the chain. In a remote-first company where work is already machine-readable, AI can build and maintain that picture continuously. What's being built, what's blocked, where resources are allocated, what's working and what isn't. That's the information the hierarchy used to carry. The company world model carries it instead.

Operationally, the logic is compelling. Decision-making cycles compress. Visibility increases. Resource allocation becomes more precise. The scale of potential efficiency is incredible.

But it would create a very different human experience of teaming.

For some people it may feel liberating: less bureaucracy, less ambiguity, and faster decisions. For others it may feel profoundly diminishing. People are no longer primarily coordinating the system together, but increasingly operating inside one that coordinates them.

It begs questions like:

• How can people be empowered alongside continuous monitoring?

• How can people feel ownership if the system is unable to care?

• How can trust be maintained when interpretation is machine-mediated?

I imagine an all-powerful Bot, turning slowly around in a high-backed armchair, stroking a white cat. But thankfully, that’s not going to happen. AI bots don’t have pets.

No seriously, it’s not like that because organizations are not purely operational systems. They are legitimacy systems too. People need to believe decisions make sense. Customers need to believe organizations remain accountable. Societies need to believe institutions remain governable.

The risk is that organizations become operationally stronger while becoming socially weaker at the same time.

Scenario 3: Shared clarity becomes the advantage

The third scenario is more speculative, but elements of it are already visible. As AI systems increasingly coordinate machine-to-machine across parts of the economy, the competitive advantage of organizations will depend less on generating answers and more on maintaining shared clarity under accelerating complexity.

In that environment, human collaboration becomes less about producing information and more about interpreting meaning together. Trust, judgment, context, and the ability to work collectively through competing interpretations become more valuable, not less.

Organizations that optimize only for acceleration may initially move faster. Organizations that build coordination capability alongside acceleration may prove more adaptive over time.

AI changes the experience of teaming, but it does not remove the requirement healthy teaming: ones that build shared meaning and coordinate. If anything, it increases it.

The real constraint is no longer how quickly organizations can generate answers. It is how effectively they can make sense of around what those answers mean, what trade-offs they create, and align on what needs to happen next.

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Mirror Mirror™ is a coordination methodology for leaders and teams in complex organizations. It uses a diagnostic to make interpretation gaps visible and a structured alignment practice to work them through. This builds shared clarity on priorities and actions so teams can coordinate more reliably, reduce delivery risk, and identify better ways forward within the work itself.

Unresolved differences about shared context and work can cause costly delivery problems. They lead to decisions and actions that don’t match up, stalling progress and creating rework and friction. Surfacing and working through disagreement is a necessary source of competitive advantage.

When you plot different interpretations on a scale of agreeability, coherence is high when responses peak together. The further apart those interpretations are, the greater the incoherence.

Different perspectives on something simple and factual can be easily identified and resolved in conversation:

PERSPECTIVE 1: We need to get the report out next Friday

PERSPECTIVE 2: The report needs external review first, so it must be ready next Thursday.

Other differences may not be so easy:

PERSPECTIVE 1:We make good decisions as a team

PERSPECTIVE 2: We could make better decisions as a team.

These raise a set of practical questions:

• Is that difference known?

• How could the team make better decisions?

• Are we talking about a lot of change or just some?

• What do the other team members think about this?

• Is this topic a priority right now, and if not, when?

When questions like these remain unaddressed, it affects quality, effectiveness, and confidence. Progress slows down, work needs to be revisited, and conversations repeat - even after decisions have apparently been made.

By the time these show up as issues, the costs are already being incurred in delivery.

By making these differences visible, you can see where incoherence sits and how it falls into three distinct patterns. Each one reveals something about how coordination is holding together, and where it is likely to come under pressure.

Factions

In this pattern, responses cluster into subgroups. These often reflect functional boundaries, geography, or hierarchy. Within each group, there is a clear internal logic. Across groups, the picture shifts.

The impact shows up as friction at the boundaries between groups. Work moves cleanly within a group and becomes harder to carry across to others. Handovers require more effort than expected, alignment conversations repeat, and decisions that felt settled in one part of the team do not land the same way elsewhere.

Over time, this can begin to shift from a coordination issue into something more personal. Differences in how the work is understood are interpreted as differences in judgement or intent, and positions start to harden. What begins as a variation in perspective becomes harder to work through as the conversation moves away from the work itself.

Spread variation

Here, responses are widely distributed with no clear centre of gravity. There is no obvious fault line between groups, yet there is no shared starting point.

In practice, this can be confusing because it may seem there is agreement on a certain point, while at a nuanced level there is not.Decisions are carried forward with slight variations in understanding, creating the need for adjustment as work unfolds. Other times, there is a clear need for discussion but with too many points to cover. Conversations revisit the same ground as people work to clarify what has already been discussed.

Polarisation

In this pattern, responses cluster at opposite ends of the scale. Some people are confident that things are working well, while others are equally convinced they are not.Each position is internally coherent, yet the team as a whole is split in how it sees the work.

This can lead to conversations that circle without resolution. Each perspective makes sense on its own terms, yet they are anchored in different interpretations of what is happening. Without a way to bring those interpretations into view and examine them side by side, positions tend to hold or become more entrenched over time.

Working through incoherence

There are two reactions to any kind of team disagreement that make things worse, regardless of how much commitment and activity there is:

• Attributing the resulting issues to capability or intent = undermines relationships

• Continuing the work without addressing the differences = perpetuates misalignment in delivery.

The practical step is to make these differences visible early, while they are still manageable.

That requires looking beyond discussion and examining how people are interpreting the same work. When those interpretations are compared in a structured way, the patterns become clear and can be worked through deliberately. What was previously implicit becomes explicit enough to act on.

The important thing to be aware of is that the perspectives held by individuals or camps are legitimate system voices, each one holding and expressing a valid part of the wider system.

Working through these perspectives is less about resolving who is right and more about understanding how the work is being seen from different positions. As those perspectives are brought together, assumptions become explicit, and the team can establish a clearer view of what needs to happen next.

Ownership becomes clearer, interdependencies are easier to manage, and coordination across roles requires less effort when there is a shared understanding of how the work fits together.

Over time, this becomes a repeatable way of working, where differences are surfaced early and used to strengthen coordination rather than disrupt it later.

A different way to think about alignment

Alignment is often treated as agreement between people. In practice, alignment is when people commit to explicit actions that advance shared goals.

It is also not static. As work evolves, interpretations shift and new gaps emerge. Teams need a way to surface and work through those differences as a regular practice, rather than waiting for issues to appear downstream.

Seen this way, divergence becomes a signal. When it is visible, it points to where coordination needs attention and where better ways forward can be established.

In complex organisations, that shift matters.It shifts alignment from something assumed to something actively worked on, and it brings the focus back to how work moves, how decisions hold, and how teams deliver together.

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Mirror Mirror™ is a coordination methodology and alignment practice for leaders and teams in complex organizations. It makes interpretation gaps visible and workable on the work in progress, helping reduce delivery risk and identify better ways forward within the work itself for sustained coordinated action.

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The effects of war, like the wars we are seeing play out today, move outward through energy markets, trade routes, political relationships, and regulatory systems, eventually shaping the conditions in which organizations operate.

Cost structures change, supply chains become less predictable, investment decisions carry greater risk, and strategic assumptions that once felt stable begin to look provisional.

This alters the psychological environment in which leadership takes place, as consequences and decisions appear larger. War, or other major threats, create conditions that feed anxiety, even among experienced leaders, which has direct consequences for how organizations coordinate.

When pressure rises, perspectives narrow

Fred Fiedler’s cognitive resource theory offers a clear explanation. Stress reduces a leader’s ability to process complex information and integrate multiple perspectives. When pressure rises, leaders rely more heavily on established experience and authority structures, and the mental effort required to weigh competing interpretations becomes harder to sustain.

Research on threat rigidity points to the same pattern at the organizational level. Groups facing external threat tend to centralize authority and restrict the flow of information. Organizations narrow their search for new inputs and default to familiar routines.

The difficulty is what happens next.

When fewer perspectives enter leadership conversations, the picture leaders work from becomes narrower. Teams further from the center of decision-making begin interpreting events independently, drawing on partial information and local experience to guide their judgments. Strategy stays constant. Shared clarity about the context in which that strategy is being implemented diverges and misalignment is set loose.

This is where the coordination problem becomes concrete, and where it tends to stay invisible longest.

• A commercial team interprets geopolitical risk as a reason to slow market expansion.

• A technology group interprets the same conditions as an argument for accelerating automation.

• Finance prioritizes cost discipline while operations focuses on securing alternative suppliers.

Each interpretation is defensible from inside its own function. Across functions, they pull in different directions.

When groups act on different interpretations of priorities, constraints, and timing, coordination starts to break down in ways that are hard to trace. Decisions interact in ways leaders didn’t anticipate, projects stall while teams revisit earlier agreements, conversations repeat because assumptions were never compared explicitly.

From the outside, these patterns look like delivery problems: initiatives moving more slowly than expected, ownership becoming blurred, leaders drawn back into operational questions they believed the organization had already resolved. The actual problem is that the organization has lost shared clarity.

Capable teams are working hard and moving in slightly different directions, each believing they are pursuing the same objective.

That gap between effort and coordination is where performance erodes.

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The coordination work only leadership can enable

Karl Weick’s research on organizational sensemaking makes a point that is easy to underestimate. Organizations adapt more effectively when leaders help groups interpret uncertainty together, rather than simplifying the situation through unilateral direction.

Shared interpretation doesn’t require everyone to see the situation identically; that is neither possible nor the goal. What matters is that teams reach enough shared clarity about priorities, constraints, and next steps to coordinate their work reliably. Organizations that maintain that clarity stay adaptive under pressure. Those that lose it experience a subtler form of disruption: sustained effort, misaligned direction.

Leadership in uncertain conditions is not only about making better decisions at the top. It is about maintaining the conditions in which coordinated action remains possible. That means actively creating space for teams to compare interpretations, surface assumptions, and reach shared clarity on priorities and constraints. When that practice is absent, divergence fills the gap. Teams stay busy, effort stays high, and the organization drifts anyway.

Leaders who navigate uncertainty most effectively are those who treat shared clarity as a routine practice, not a one-off communication exercise.

Fiedler, F. E. (1996). Research on leadership selection and training. Administrative Science Quarterly.

Staw, B. M., Sandelands, L. E., & Dutton, J. (1981). Threat rigidity effects in organizational behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly.

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage.

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Mirror Mirror™ is a coordination methodology and alignment practice for leaders and teams in complex organizations. It makes interpretation gaps visible in the real work in progress, helping teams reduce delivery risk and find better ways to implement strategy. By combining diagnostic data with structured perspective comparison, it builds shared clarity and enables sustained coordinated action.

In our third global Strategic Alignment and Leadership research, one finding stood out clearly: most organisations assume alignment because performance holds. As a strategic advisor and Mirror Mirror practitioner, I see the same pattern in practice. Alignment is rarely measured directly. It is inferred. And in complex environments, that can create risk

Most executive teams believe they are aligned.

Performance is reviewed, and strategic initiatives are tracked. Dashboards are visible – sometimes monthly or quarterly, and sometimes in real time. Delivery is discussed in detail.

From there, a quiet assumption forms: if results are holding and milestones are being met, the organisation must be aligned.

When we asked CEOs and senior leaders how strategic alignment is measured, that assumption began to shift.

“No one measures alignment per se. They measure profit or performance and assume that if that’s good, alignment must be too. It’s a proxy measure, not an intentional one.”
Simon Cavendish, SCMP, Internal & Change Communications Consultant

This view was not isolated. Across sectors, leaders described measurement systems that are disciplined and sophisticated, yet rarely designed to test alignment directly.

Financial performance matters. Operational metrics matter. Strategy execution systems matter. They bring visibility and accountability. What they do not automatically confirm is whether people interpret priorities the same way or whether trade-offs are resolved through a shared lens.

As Katie Macauley, CEO, AB, put it:

“Unless you do a specific piece of work on alignment, you’re only using proxy measures. That’s the reality for most.”

Although there’s a clear gap in measurement, those that do measure see results.

“Most aren’t measuring alignment on what truly drives success. Where boards set C-suite KPIs around alignment, you see measurement. When people do measure it, they have aha moments and valuable conversations they haven’t had before.”
Iain Good, Founder & Partner, Premiumisation Partners + Good Coaching & Mentoring

Alignment lives in shared clarity, behaviour, commitment and action. These require deliberate examination.

When consistency starts to loosen

At the start of a strategy cycle, alignment feels strong. The intent is clear.

“We’re on the same page” is often said. Energy is high.

The real test comes when friction arises, such as budget constraints, clashing priorities, market shifts, operational bottlenecks, geopolitical factors, unexpected regulatory moves, and even new leadership hires.

“Everyone is aligned until they hit roadblocks. Then, in finding solutions, they convince themselves they’re still aligned, but a one per cent drift becomes two, then three, and eventually it spreads.”

Andre Oberholzer, Group Executive, Corporate Affairs, Sappi Ltd.

That description captures something familiar.

If five senior leaders describe the strategy in materially different ways, the variation is not cosmetic. If capital allocation, hiring decisions, and executive time do not align with declared priorities, the organisation receives mixed signals, regardless of how clearly the strategy has been communicated.

None of this happens dramatically. It accumulates through reasonable, locally justified decisions. Over time, those decisions reshape execution.

Performance may still appear solid for a while. However, strategy cycles are shortening. Priorities evolve within quarters, not years. That compresses the gap between small inconsistencies and tangible consequences.

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The lag problem

Many organisations rely on annual engagement surveys as an indirect measure of alignment. The cadence itself has become part of the risk.

Sushant Vashisht, Director, Corporate Communications & Employee Brand, Adobe (India, Asia Pacific, Japan):

“Fatigue and emotion cycles that took twelve months now take three. If you wait a year, negative sentiment amplifies fourfold.”

In an environment where strategic direction can shift mid-year, a 12-month measurement rhythm leaves long stretches in which leaders operate on assumptions.

Engagement data has value when the right questions are asked. If surveys explicitly test whether people understand priorities, see how their work connects to them, and observe consistency in leadership behaviour, they can provide useful signals. Yet engagement is often treated as proof of alignment when it is more accurately an outcome influenced by it.

Lag matters. By the time data is analysed and cascaded, strategic direction may already have shifted. In shorter strategy cycles, reliance on lagging proxies creates blind spots.

For leaders focused on growth, the issue is coordinated action. When priorities are interpreted differently, decisions slow, and capital spreads thinner than intended. The impact rarely appears dramatic at first: it builds across quarters. Deliberate measurement shortens that feedback loop before performance is impacted.

The decision lens

One of the clearest insights from the research reframed the issue simply:

“They don’t measure alignment… what matters is whether employees can articulate the strategy in their own words — and whether decisions reflect priorities.”

Heather Young, Communications & Management Executive

This shifts the focus from communication output to decision-making patterns.

When trade-offs are tight, which initiatives proceed? Which are paused? Which metrics influence incentives? How often are executive decisions reopened because interpretations differ across functions?

Those patterns are observable, and they can be examined deliberately.

Some organisations are tightening the links between strategic priorities, initiatives, and accountability in real time. Others use structured diagnostics to surface where leadership teams see priorities and ways of working, how they execute differently, and where cross-functional tension sits. The specific approach varies. The common element is intent: alignment is treated as something that can be tested rather than assumed.

Where measurement is genuinely embedded, it becomes operational. One Fortune 500 Operations Executive described a workforce of thousands across 16 countries and mine sites, where everyone is clear about what the organisation is trying to achieve each year and how it is measured. Individuals understand how their KPIs link to the strategy and the dashboard. Quarterly reviews test progress, and if results slip, the business adjusts.

“How you’re assessed as an individual is based on strategic alignment… It impacts your short- and long-term incentives, your career opportunities, and your growth.”

Nicole Bearne, Founder & Director, The Comms Exchange, compressed it further:
“In the best systems, everyone’s development reviews link back to how they’re fulfilling the strategy. That’s how you measure it — through behaviour and delivery, not just sentiment.”

Where that discipline exists, alignment becomes visible in behaviour rather than being inferred from results.

Why is it not examined more often

Testing alignment directly is confronting. It can reveal differences in interpretation at senior levels, expose where incentives contradict declared priorities, and surface blind spots at the top.

Once visible, those gaps require coordinated action.

Russell Grossman, Executive Director Communications, ORR – Office of Road & Rail, framed the dilemma directly:

“If you do measure it, will you change what you want to do? Or is it just for your own comfort?”

Measurement creates accountability. It shifts alignment from intent to governance. Without evidence, accountability relies on assumption.

More than that, it creates an obligation. Once misalignment is visible, leaders are no longer free to dismiss it as anecdotal. They must either adjust behaviour, incentives and priorities, or consciously accept the consequences.

Avoiding measurement can therefore be rational. If you are not prepared to act, there is safety in assumption.

An engineering perspective from a Strategy & Management Executive expressed the principle plainly:

“If you’re not measuring it, you can’t improve it. There’s no feedback loop.”

Strategic alignment follows the same logic. Without feedback, small deviations accumulate. In compressed strategy cycles, this accumulation happens faster than many leaders expect.

A leadership question

In this early insights series, we have explored the alignment paradox, the understanding of alignment itself, trust, listening, psychological safety, and the accelerating pressures shaping organisations today. Each theme influences whether people choose to move together.

Measurement determines whether leaders know if they are.

When alignment weakens (and it will), it’s rarely overt. It shows in small adjustments to priorities, in justified reallocations of time and capital, in interpretations that seem reasonable in isolation, in duplicated effort, in disconnected employees, and in time wasted on firefighting. Over successive strategy cycles, those adjustments shape execution and culture.

The proxy problem is not about tools or sentiment at a point in time. It is about evidence.

When you say your organisation is aligned, what proof would withstand scrutiny beyond financial performance? And in a strategy cycle measured in quarters, not years, how quickly would you detect that alignment is starting to shift?

The full third global Strategic Alignment and Leadership white paper will be released in mid-March 2026. If you’d like early access to the full white paper, sign up here. You can also subscribe to the Clear Leaders Substack for continuing research updates.

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Mirror Mirror™ is a scalable methodology and practice for leadership and cross-team alignment. It reduces delivery risk and unlocks new opportunities by making alignment measurable and repeatable — combining diagnostic data with structured dialogue to drive shared clarity and coordinated action.

In the 1970s, tennis coach Timothy Gallwey made a simple but radical observation. People don’t usually underperform because they lack ability. They underperform because something gets in the way.

He captured it in a short equation:

Performance = Potential – Interference

Gallwey was writing about sport, but the idea quickly found its way into leadership and organizational life because it names something leaders recognize immediately: capable people, sound strategies, strong intent - yet progress feels slower, heavier, more fragile than it should.

The question isn’t whether organizations have potential. Most do.

The more useful question is: where is the interference coming from?

From individual interference to organizational interference

Gallwey originally focused on internal interference: self-doubt, anxiety, overthinking, fear of failure. These inner dynamics are important at work too.

But organizations add layers of complexity. People don’t perform alone, they think, decide, and act together in meetings, systems, routines, and relationships.

Which means interference doesn’t just live inside individuals. It also emerges between people and within the system itself.

This is where two powerful lenses help explain why alignment breaks down even when the strategy is clear: interaffectivity and distributed cognition.

Interaffectivity: how emotion becomes interference

Interaffectivity describes how emotional states are shaped in interaction.

In organizations, moods and orientations don’t stay contained within individuals. They spread, amplify, dampen, and steer behavior.

You see interaffectivity at work when:

• a meeting feels tense before anything difficult is said

• energy lifts when someone shows genuine curiosity

• silence follows a dismissive response

• people stop contributing, not because they don’t care, but because it no longer feels worth the risk.

These emotional dynamics shape how meaning is made together. They influence whether people listen, challenge, explore, or retreat.

Research in 2022 from Jones, Pasternak, and Volet1 find that embodied interaffectivity contributes to the emergence and maintenance of group cohesion in collaborative contexts.

So, from this perspective, interference isn’t only about confidence or capability. It’s relational drag, emotional patterns that make shared thinking harder than it needs to be.

Even strong ideas struggle to move when the emotional field is misaligned.

Distributed cognition: how systems get in the way of thinking

Distributed cognition pushes the idea of interference further. It challenges a deeply held assumption in organizational life: that thinking happens mainly in people’s heads.

In reality, cognition is distributed across:

• tools and technologies

• meeting structures

• processes and routines

• physical and digital spaces

• who holds information, who speaks, who decides.

When a team meets, thinking is shaped by far more than what individuals know. It’s shaped by agendas, slides, seating, time pressure, metrics, and incentives.

A dashboard can narrow thinking. A reporting ritual can silence uncertainty. A decision process can hide crucial knowledge.

This isn’t about motivation or mindset. It’s structural interference: friction built into the way work is organized.

From a distributed cognition lens, misalignment persists not because people don’t understand, but because the system makes shared understanding difficult to form and sustain.

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Interference as a breakdown of shared meaning

This is where the threads come together.

In organizations, interference is anything that disrupts shared meaning.

• Interaffectivity explains how meaning breaks down emotionally and relationally

• Distributed cognition explains how meaning breaks down structurally and materially.

Together, they explain a familiar paradox: why organizations with high potential still struggle to perform.

Teams may agree on goals, yet act at cross-purposes. They may understand the strategy, yet interpret priorities differently. And, they may want to collaborate, yet feel subtly blocked from doing so.

In each case, the issue isn’t effort. It’s interference in how meaning is created and held together.

Alignment as the reduction of interference

Seen this way, alignment isn’t about forcing agreement or cascading messages more efficiently. It’s about removing the conditions that distort shared meaning.

That shifts the work of leaders and teams:

• from telling to hosting

• from explaining to enabling sense-making

• from controlling behavior to shaping conditions

It invites different questions:

• Where does knowledge actually live here?

• What emotional signals are people picking up, even when nothing is said?

• Which structures support thinking together, and which quietly undermine it?

• What forms of interference have we normalized?

Often, small changes make a disproportionate difference:

• who speaks first

• how disagreement is handled

• whether uncertainty is allowed

• whether meetings are designed for thinking or simply for reporting

When interference drops, potential has room to show up.

The real work of team alignment

This is why alignment isn’t a one-off exercise or a communication cascade. It’s an ongoing practice of attending to how meaning is formed - emotionally, relationally, and systemically.

Team alignment is the discipline of reducing interference so that:

• people can think together

• knowledge can surface from unexpected places

• energy flows instead of dissipates

• performance reflects the potential that was there all along

Not by asking people to try harder, but by making it easier for the organization to work as one.

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Mirror Mirror™ is a scalable approach to leadership and cross-team alignment that helps organizations reduce the interference that gets in the way of shared understanding and effective action. Through its diagnostic, facilitated dialogue process, and practitioner training, teams learn how to align themselves which enables clearer thinking, better decisions, and sustained progress as conditions change.

Dear Readers,

As we close out another year, I’ve found myself reflecting more than usual, perhaps because 2025 seemed to sprint past at double speed.

I’ve been asking myself: Did we focus on what really matters? Did we learn for the betterment of ourselves and the teams we work with? Can we add more meaning and value going forward?

For a moment, let’s pause…

This year, we made a conscious effort to get back to basics. To separate the signals from the noise. To spend more time understanding problems, needs, and demands in the market. That meant asking questions, listening more closely, and digging deeper into how what we do meets those needs.

One outcome of this was becoming more connected to client experiences that call for better alignment. Situations like fast growth, digital transformation, restructures, hybrid teaming, tension between innovation and operations, leadership turnover, global-local frictions … basically these are the messy, human, real-world scenarios that happen everywhere.

We also asked why we do alignment work, and not change management, mediation, or something else. That one was easier to answer. It’s because we (I think I can speak on behalf of the team and the wider network here) believe that alignment is the backbone of effective teaming in complex environments. Yet, because it is often poorly understood or treated superficially, there’s a real need to change that. That’s what we do and it’s what we’re good at.

We also deeply believe that people bring both their own power and potential to work, and that under the right circumstances, teams can absolutely align to deliver amazing outcomes in tough, dynamic environments.

One of our big priorities for the year ahead is to make that connection clearer in everything we do. In our design, our communications, our data. We’ll be sharing more examples and case studies that help teams recognize themselves – their tensions, their opportunities, and their turning points - through the alignment lens.

Because alignment isn’t abstract, it’s practical. It’s the systems view that allows organizations to function as one system, rather than as disconnected parts.

Which leads me to a second top priority for 2026: delivering more high-value alignment programmes that meet clients where they are, and being clearer about how and why that work creates value.

We’ll also be turning our obsession for alignment into something even more tangible: we’ll be launching a book on team alignment - official announcement with our publisher coming soon:) It’s already 80% written and draws on years of insights, field experience, observed client patterns, and hard-earned truths. Our hope is that it supports leaders and teams everywhere, not just the ones we work with directly.

Alongside that, we will also be completing the accreditation of our alignment training programme with a recognized body - more details to follow.

So as I think about 2025 , we’re still on track and can be proud of how things went. Looking to 2026, I feel excitement, optimism, and a healthy dose of curiosity about what’s possible.

Thank you for reading, for engaging, and for being part of this. Your curiosity and courage to explore the messy middle is what makes this all meaningful and enjoyable.

Here’s to the New Year - a year of shared clarity, courage, and connection.

Wishing you and yours a wonderful festive season,

Lindsay

A facilitator running one of our team alignment workshops recently shared something that stuck with me.

During a session, participants were taking it in turns to share how they saw a particular team challenge. What she noticed was subtle but persistent: after one person shared their perspective, another would jumped in with the urge to ‘fix’ it.

“Were you aware that…”
“If you did this instead…”
“You could see it differently if…”

It was as if the other’s view wasn’t valid until it matched their own. The facilitator, Sorcha O’Connor, used her expertise to intervene and bring them back to the process.

That moment crystallized a truth about how humans relate to the world. We cling to our positions not only because they feel comfortable, but because they feel right. When someone else sees things differently, our instinct is to correct rather than understand.

The Mirror Mirror approach is built to explore and leverage these gaps. Each participant shares how they see a challenge for two to three minutes — without interruption — so a shared understanding builds up, including areas of common ground and difference. It takes practice to listen without resistance.

Our beliefs aren’t fixed

When it comes to our own perspectives, we often forget that truth, information, interpretation, and memory aren’t static pillars. They evolve. They’re shaped by context, by what we notice, and by what we resist changing.

Facts - Information - Interpretation - Belief - Memory

As our environment shifts, what once felt factual can become an outdated interpretation. Even our memories distort over time. Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History recounts the case of journalist Brian Williams, who vividly remembered being in a helicopter hit by ground fire, until evidence showed he wasn’t. Gladwell1 cites “flashbulb memory” research showing people would be insistent on their recollections of the events of 9/11, then later change them. Memory isn’t a record; it’s a reconstruction.

We like to think our beliefs rest on facts. In reality, facts are filtered through context, interpretation, and emotion. Once beliefs harden, they shape what we see next.

Research by Zhao et al. (2024)2 shows people integrate feedback more strongly when it aligns with their prior beliefs. Another study3 reveal that when information is open to interpretation it tends to skew over time toward polarization.

Why we hold on so tightly

Holding firm to our views gives us certainty, identity, and control. But several well-known biases keep us stuck:

• Confirmation bias4 – We seek and recall information that supports what we already believe.

• Conservatism bias5 – We under-react to new evidence, updating too slowly or not at all.

• Belief perseverance – Even when proven wrong, we stick to our story. The brain favors coherence over accuracy.

No one’s immune. I’ve seen these biases play out in organizations - teams defending their assumptions about markets or customers long after conditions changed. When someone asks, “What if that’s no longer true?” we often dig in rather than adapt.

The role of context

Context doesn’t just change what happens, it changes how we see what happens. A market evolves, a team matures, a system shifts. Yet our internal narratives lag behind. We are prone to operate from “how things were,” not “how things are”, which is a gap with reality.

A belief once useful becomes an anchor. When teams stay attached to outdated perspectives, they lose agility and alignment drifts.

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Rewiring our thinking

Breaking out of these patterns isn’t easy because it goes against how our brains evolved. Cognitive shortcuts help us make quick decisions, but they tether us to the familiar and lead us to assumptions that may be off track.

Neuroscientist Tali Sharot (2011)6 found that confirmation bias activates the brain’s reward system: agreement feels good. Changing our minds feels like loss. Yet neuroscientist Richard Davidson (2012)7 shows that awareness and openness make the brain more flexible. Perspective-taking—pausing to imagine how someone else sees a situation—reduces bias and improves collaboration.

Reflection interrupts automatic thinking. It’s not about erasing bias but managing it: noticing when it appears, testing assumptions, and staying curious long enough for new insight to emerge. Over time, that practice rewires not only how we think, but how we relate.

Alignment in action

At Mirror Mirror, we facilitate dialogue not to “convert” others, but to learn from them. Sorcha’s story captures this perfectly: when we stop trying to fix each other’s views and start exploring context, we expand understanding, both for them and for ourselves.

We can trust our views as reflections of our lived experience, yet still hold them lightly. Context evolves. Memory shifts. Beliefs age. The question isn’t whether our view is right, but whether it’s still right now.

Holding our perspectives lightly creates space for growth, for adaptation, for alignment—within teams and within ourselves.

The greatest strength of a colleague isn’t being right; it’s being willing to learn. Especially when they’re sure.

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Mirror Mirror™ id a scalable approach to leadership and cross-team alignment that helps organizations build the capability to adapt and thrive. Through its diagnostic, dialogue process, and facilitator training, teams learn how to align themselves, enabling faster, better decisions and accelerating progress.

We’re living in a time when the clock speed of organisations keeps accelerating.

Strategy cycles are shorter. Horizons are shrinking. Teams are expected to deliver transformation and performance – simultaneously, continuously, endlessly.

At this velocity, alignment can easily slip into assumption. Communication becomes broadcast and cascades. Listening turns into waiting for your turn to speak.

In our third Strategic Alignment and Leadership research study (2025)* – led by Wayne Aspland and me – we’ve interviewed more than 50 executive and senior leaders, including CEOs, Chiefs of Staff, Strategy, Operations, and Communication leaders and experts. Alongside insights from the recent APAC Chief Strategy Officer Conference hosted by The Strategy Brief, one truth has become clear:

To work effectively at pace, leaders must slow down; to listen, to question, to connect, and to act.

It’s the paradox of leadership in complexity: the faster everything moves, the more vital it becomes to pause with purpose.

Listening as strategic infrastructure

Across the research interviews and the conference sessions, the strongest teams shared a defining habit: they make space for conversation. They don’t rely on cascades and talking points to carry strategy; they engage in real dialogue that reveals how people understand and interpret it.

One executive told me in a research interview,

“People rarely disagree with the strategy; they disagree with how it’s interpreted.”

That simple insight captures why alignment fractures. It’s not the plan; it’s the meaning-making.

In his conference keynote on neuroinclusion, Jim Hogan reminded us that “exclusion doesn’t just silence insight – it blinds the system.” He wasn’t talking about empathy as a moral gesture, but about the architecture of inclusion as a strategic necessity.

When leaders listen deeply, create the structure and space for others to do the same, and set clear guardrails for decision-making and action, they expand what the organisation can perceive and how it can adapt.

Listening is not an interpersonal nicety; it’s a capability that shapes performance, learning, and connection.

Conversation as the engine of execution

Robert Marshall, Chief Strategy Officer at St Vincent’s Health, put it plainly: “Up to 30 per cent of failure can be attributed to the way people work together.”

That failure doesn’t come from poor frameworks; it comes from gaps in communication, trust, clarity, and shared understanding.

At St Vincent’s, strategy isn’t simply cascaded. It’s talked through, argued about, and re-interpreted in cycles. As Marshall described it, “Strategy is storytelling of the future.” His team focuses on building a shared picture through conversation – clarity of language, connection across levels, and consistency of story.

Susan Wallace from Smart Group echoed the same when she said, “Transformation dies from chaos, not strategy.” That chaos often comes when leaders rush to act before they’ve listened enough to align.

Disciplined execution doesn’t mean moving faster; it means moving together – and making sure people feel heard and involved.
Conversation is how teams synchronise their rhythm.

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Curiosity, storytelling, presence, and the courage for difference

Our research keeps returning to a central finding: the communicative capabilities of leaders – listening, curiosity, storytelling, and presence – set the conditions for alignment and effective execution.

Curiosity opens up thinking. It’s the ability to ask powerful questions that invite others to share what they see and feel. Storytelling with intent gives direction its emotional weight, helping people connect their work to purpose. And presence – the ability to be fully in the conversation – builds trust, the foundation of any high-performing team.

When leaders proactively cultivate these habits with their teams and stakeholders, communication shifts from information exchange to shared sense-making. Teams stop talking past each other and start thinking together – not in sameness, but in constructive difference.

They learn to welcome productive conflict that is respectful, inclusive, and generative. They also take the time to objectively identify where misalignment exists, so they can address it before it becomes resistance.

That’s what keeps thinking fresh and alignment alive as a practice.

The leadership paradox of pace

As several CSOs shared at the conference, the pressure to deliver has never been higher.

Strategic horizons are contracting – many now nine months or less.

The long-term vision and purpose remain clear, but the strategic moves and disciplined execution happen at pace: to out-manoeuvre competitors, disrupt themselves, scale and grow.

The leaders who listen – up, down, and across – and act on what they learn from frontline employees, customers, and stakeholders gain the clearest view of reality. They see the early warning signs and emerging opportunities that may never surface in board papers.

That’s why slowing down isn’t indulgence; it’s discipline.

The leaders who intentionally pause to listen, reflect, and reframe aren’t resisting pace; they’re enabling it.

They create clarity before motion, coherence before execution, and commitment before momentum. That’s what allows pace to become sustainable.

Listening as the practice of alignment

Alignment doesn’t happen because we agree; it happens because we seek to understand.

And understanding can’t be forced; it must be built, conversation by conversation.

As a Mirror Mirror practitioner, I’ve seen this play out. Teams don’t necessarily misalign because they disagree on strategy. They misalign because they interpret it differently, and rarely slow down to explore those differences.

The Mirror Mirror process gives teams a structured space to do exactly that: to listen to one another, surface what’s real, and reconnect meaning with action.

When people listen, truly listen, something shifts.

The noise quiets, the story aligns, and strategy starts to move with rhythm and intent.

Because in the end, it’s not speed that supports shared clarity and alignment.

It’s conversation.

* Our third global Strategic Alignment and Leadership research white paper will be released in January 2026. If you’d like to receive a copy when it drops – and gain early access to global insights on how leaders align faster at pace – join the white paper waitlist and stay part of the conversation.

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Mirror Mirror™ is a scalable approach to leadership and team alignment that helps organizations build the capability to adapt and thrive. Through its diagnostic, dialogue process, and facilitator training, teams learn how to slow down to align themselves, which enables faster, better decisions and accelerating progress where it matters most.

A client we recently worked with shared something that may sound familiar:

“We have a strategy I believe in. We have good people. But when I look across the organization, I see decisions slowing down, energy leaking, and teams working hard but not always together. It feels like we’re pushing with the brakes half on.”

What she described wasn’t a lack of capability or effort. It came down to misalignment. People saw their challenges differently, so energy went into friction instead of progress.

When her leadership team started working systematically on alignment — getting clear together on goals and priorities, pinpointing areas of tension, and deciding on the best next steps — things shifted quickly. Conversations sharpened. Decisions sped up. Engagement lifted. The brakes came off.

She wanted to embed the work as an iterative process and extend it to more teams. After all, when would you ever stop realigning as things evolve? But there’s a cost to doing it well. That raised a question that haunts many leaders and Learning & Development professionals:

“How can we measure the ROI of team alignment work?”

Why ROI Doesn’t Work Here

There’s a clear link between alignment and performance — but proving it is nearly impossible.

Alignment outcomes are dynamic and interconnected. ROI, on the other hand, assumes linear cause and effect. Unless you can trace every variable, you can’t isolate what caused what.

When alignment breaks down, so does performance — but not in ways dashboards can easily show.

The Logic Chain of Alignment

When a team is aligned, a clear chain reaction follows:

Alignment on shared context → Better collective sensemaking → Stronger commitment → More effective delivery → Better results → Improved performance.

This is how performance really happens — the practical logic of people working in sync.

Take just one example from our diagnostic tool:

“We apply shared values to enhance our work.”

When that statement rings true, the ripple effects are profoundly commercial:

Reinforced values → clearer behaviors → better alignment → stronger decisions → improved experiences for customers and employees → higher retention, faster cycles, stronger reputation → better performance.

From ROI to ROE: Return on Expectations

Team alignment doesn’t fit neatly into an ROI formula — and ROI itself rarely tells the full story. That doesn’t make it unmeasurable; it calls for a different lens.

Leaders often look for proof when what they need is perspective. Instead of chasing an impossible ROI calculation, focus on Return on Expectations (ROE) — a more flexible and human way to track impact.

Ask:

• What outcomes matter most from this work?

• How will we see progress — in data, observation, or stories?

• How can we stay adaptive as things shift?

This approach is customized, contextual, and practical. Using the shared values example, ripple effects might appear in metrics such as lower hiring costs, higher NPS, shorter time-to-market, or smoother sales conversations.

Levers vs. Outcomes: What You Can Act On and What You Can Measure

In alignment, there are two kinds of impact:

Levers: the practices, structures, leadership behaviors, and conditions you can shape.
Outcomes: the lived experiences that signal effectiveness and can be measured.

Mirror Mirror identifies 14 levers of alignment — such as purpose, strategy, values, leadership, adaptability, and collaboration — and 10 outcomes, including commitment, motivation, innovation, belonging, and confidence.

These show up in surveys, behaviors, data, and stories. Mapping what’s already measured, and what could be, creates your ROE mix. For example:

Resilience

• Survey: “We recover quickly from setbacks.”

• Observation: Bounce-back time after challenges.

• Story: How a team handled a recent setback.
  

Motivation

• Survey: “We’re motivated to do our best.”

• Data: Retention rates, internal mobility.

• Observation: Energy in meetings, people stepping up.
  

Innovation

• Survey: “We have the freedom to innovate.”

• Output: Number of new initiatives or process improvements.

• Story: Examples of creative solutions implemented.
  

This blended approach makes the invisible visible — and avoids the trap of chasing a single metric that can never tell the whole story.

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Alignment: a Leadership Imperative

As a CEO, your job isn’t only to deliver the numbers — it’s to shape the conditions that make those numbers possible.

Alignment is one of the few multipliers that cuts across every part of your business. When teams align, execution accelerates. When they don’t, performance drags. That gap often separates organizations that grow from those that stall.

So maybe the better question isn’t:

“What’s the ROI of alignment?”

But rather:

“What’s the cost of leaving your teams misaligned?”

That cost shows up in slower decision-making, wasted effort, missed opportunities, and disengaged talent — all of which eventually hit your bottom line.

Alignment isn’t about control. It’s about creating the conditions where people can do their best work, together.

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Mirror Mirror™ is a leadership and cross-team alignment approach that helps teams think, act, and work together more effectively on their real challenges. It combines a diagnostic, a dialogue process, and facilitator training, so teams can practice self-alignment. The result: stronger engagement, more adaptive teaming, improved effectiveness, and sustained performance over time.

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Every team in your organization runs its own leg of the race. Progress depends on smooth handoffs – the baton reaching the right person, in the right way, at the right time.

In practice, teams often fumble the handoff. Sometimes the failures are obvious: a missed deadline or another round of rework. Other times they show up quietly: information arrives too late, or people chase details that should have been shared upfront.

Think back to your own experience. How much focus goes into running fast, or beating previous completion times, compared with the quality of the handoffs that make them possible?

Behind each exchange, people juggle priorities and interpret signals differently. When the baton pass doesn’t go well, teams lose energy, trust weakens, and performance suffers.

Cross-team alignment is one of the most valuable, and most overlooked, drivers of organizational effectiveness.

Four ways cross-team alignment is the weakest link

1. The problems look simple.

Leaders often assume teams will fix handoff issues themselves. On the surface, the complaints sound tactical:

“We need this information earlier.”

“We’re missing key data when work lands on our desk.”

In reality, those closest to the problem rarely have the authority to bring the right people together to fix it.

2. Everyone has a view, but few see the system.

It’s human to spot a visible problem and jump to conclusions about the cause. Psychologists Tversky and Kahneman1 showed how mental shortcuts , heuristics, drive people to quick judgments without full information.

In organizations, that means a team might demand data earlier without knowing whether the other team even has it at that stage. Another may expect a quick fix that the system can’t reliably deliver. What looks like a tactical gap often masks a systemic issue.

3. People struggle to prioritize alignment.

Cross-team issues rarely feel urgent enough to prioritize. Bringing the right people together seems less important than hitting today’s delivery targets. Complaints keep circling while nothing really changes.

4. Needs move faster than responses.

As priorities shift, processes often stay stuck in the past. Teams adapt on the ground, but the organization doesn’t always keep up. Without a way to adjust quickly, teams drop the baton again and again.

What failure looks like in progress

• Work requests spin in circles and never land.

• Emails bury important actions until the moment passes.

• Different interpretations stall decisions and fracture accountability.

• Leaders ignore misalignment, signaling it doesn’t matter — which discourages others from taking responsibility.

This is how disengagement spreads. People stop trying to fix what feels unfixable.

What leaders can do

Cross-team misalignment doesn’t fix itself. Treat it as a priority, not a nuisance.

Step 1 – Ask Questions to Start Defining the Issues

Gather perspectives to get underneath what appears to be the problem:

• What’s happening?

• What are the implications?

• Why does it matter?

• How urgent is it?

• Who can influence it?

• Are there any obvious fixes?

Step 2 – Facilitate an alignment dialogue.

Bring the right stakeholders together and guide the conversation with structure:

• Set out the purpose of the meeting and how the process will run

• Ask those present to share their perspectives on what’s going on and why it’s relevant to shared goals (without interruption from others)

• Invite clarifying questions after each person has spoken

• Acknowledge any areas of disagreement, without trying to get people to agree with each other’s views or opinions

• Ask the group what has shifted in their understanding of things, having heard from the others

• Have the group come up with possible next steps together and agree on a course of action, including who will do what.

This isn’t always easy. It takes some discipline and patience. Yet the more people practice this – the more it becomes part of everyday work – and the greater the organization’s adaptive capacity grows.

Alignment dialogues don’t just resolve cross-team challenges. They strengthen teams internally too. When people share openly and feel heard, the heat comes out of the system. Empathy grows. Group learning happens. And what once felt like polarization starts to turn into common ground.

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At Mirror Mirror™, we work with leaders and teams to uncover the misalignments that derail delivery and collaboration. Our process combines data, dialogue, and rhythm to surface invisible blockers and restore shared focus. It’s a practical way to cut through the noise so your teams can think, act, and work better, together.

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