Most organisational change initiatives are designed at the top and pushed down. This is not a failure of intent — it is a structural consequence of how organisations are built. The people with the authority to make change happen are rarely the same as the people with the closest understanding of what the change will encounter in practice. The result is a predictable failure mode: a strategy that is analytically sound and organisationally brittle.

The alignment problem

Most organisations know they have an alignment problem. They address it through communication — town halls, strategy decks, cascade briefings, change management programmes. The assumption embedded in this approach is that alignment is a communication challenge: if people understood the strategy as well as those who designed it, they would be aligned. This assumption is wrong. Alignment is not a communication challenge. It is an understanding challenge. And understanding is not something that can be transmitted — it has to be built.

When the people who will implement a decision were part of building the understanding behind it, they don't need to be sold on it. The alignment is already there.

What built alignment looks like

In one organisation using Hunome, an apparently aligned leadership team discovered through a structured collective deliberation that their shared commitment to a strategic direction concealed three distinct and incompatible interpretations of what the strategy actually required. All three groups of leaders were sincere. All three were using the same language. None of them knew the others were working from different understandings. The discovery happened before the strategy was launched. It changed the nature of the subsequent planning process — not to resolve the incompatibility by management decree, but to surface and work through it deliberately.

Changing the sequence

Collective deliberation before the decision, not alignment communication after it. Bring the people who will carry the change into the understanding that will produce it — before the strategy is fixed, before the communication plan is written, before the change program is designed. This is not slower. In most organisations it is faster — because the time spent building genuine shared understanding before the decision is a fraction of the time spent trying to fix the consequences of a decision made without it.