The False Alignment Trap

Decades of experience and research have consistently shown that most organizational change efforts fail. In 1993 Michael Hammer, who launched the business-process-reengineering movement, somberly concluded in his book Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution that “as many as 50% to 70% of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended.”

Things have not improved with the passing of time. Over the past 20 years Boston Consulting Group research into nearly 2,000 public companies from around the globe has found that more than 70% of companies fail to outperform their industry peer-group average in both the short (one year) and long term (five years) after a performance downturn. It is a remarkable data point. During the same period, we digitized the global economy, mapped the human genome, and built self-driving cars. But we did not get systematically better at helping groups of people to do things differently.

There is, of course, no simple reason why companies struggle so much with change, but in many cases change failures can be traced to dysfunction at the top. Members of the leadership team often fall into a behavioral trap: false alignment around the transformation they’re attempting to implement. In this article we’ll describe the trap, explain why executives get stuck in it, and present the consequences, drawing on our studies of and experience with companies we’ve advised or researched. We’ll conclude by offering guidance on what leaders need to do to ensure true agreement with and around change, illustrating the process with the success and experiences of Alexander Lacik, the former CEO of the Danish jewelry group Pandora.

The False Alignment Trap

Every change program needs clear answers to a few seemingly obvious questions:

1. Why are we changing our company?

2. What are we changing about our company? (And what are we not changing?)

3. How will the changes occur?

Executive teams often make the mistake of embarking on a transformation before everyone truly agrees on the specific answers to those questions. Worse, executives frequently behave as if they are much more in agreement than they really are.

Alignment and agreement are not the same. Alignment suggests a set of objects that are positioned in a line or perhaps facing the same direction. When company leaders say, “We are aligned,” what they usually mean is, “We are not in one another’s way.” Or perhaps, “We have discussed this topic at least once and generally accept the contours of a plan.”

But during change efforts, leaders need to do more than stay out of one another’s way. They need to intensely collaborate, compromise, and communicate in harmony. Leaders who settle for mere alignment typically find that it fails them in the end—which is why we call it false. By contrast, leaders who work hard to create detailed and explicit compacts—what we call true agreement—find that they can effectively make progress on shared priorities and hold one another to account.

A memorable case of false alignment we have encountered took place at a North American energy distribution company. The CEO invited us to help the client’s executive team prepare the business for a potential sale. The CEO said that everyone had agreed on the planned program of changes that needed to be implemented before the company could put up the “For Sale” sign. But when we started to ask questions, we found that while the executive team members believed they were in agreement, they really weren’t at all.

Our first question was simple: “How clear are you on the specific ways in which the new company will be different?” In response, 10 out of 13 executives said they were “very clear” or “clear.” Then we asked about the executives’ perceptions of one another: “How aligned do you believe this senior leadership team is on the specific ways in which the new company will be different?” Eight out of 13 said they felt aligned.

But when we probed further, we found that the reality was otherwise. When we asked executives to write down “the specific ways in which the new company will be different,” the executives expressed widely diverging views:

• One said: “The system will be larger and more complex, but the operations processes will be very similar to present.”

• Another said that the change was mostly about “standing and competing alone without a large parent corporation in charge.”

• A third said that there would be “new assets, new markets, different cost structure, new people, and new leaders.”

If these leaders had simply shared their interpretations of the planned change with their respective departments (and directed their teams accordingly), each group would have moved further away from the CEO’s intention—some by a few degrees, some by a lot. Along the way the goals of the program would have become more difficult and confusing for employees to execute against, and leaders would have become increasingly frustrated with the lack of outcomes.

As you can imagine, the executives were shocked by their disparate responses. They concluded on the spot that they needed to spend much more time together discussing the true purpose and nature of their transformation program.

When we conduct this exercise with other executive teams, the results are similar. As Hany Fam, the founder and CEO of the global business identity platform Markaaz, told us, “I’ve learned the falsehood of consensus and the danger of consensus. There are many passive aspects of consensus that don’t equate to true agreement. Often you see it in subtle ways…someone nods along, saying, ‘Yes, yes, I’m on board,’ but in reality, they’re not.”

Common Causes of False Alignment

False alignment typically occurs for one of three reasons.

Executives don’t realize that they don’t agree. It sounds incredible, doesn’t it? How can high-performance executives fail to realize that they don’t agree?

This situation is more common than you might think. It’s an expression of the false consensus effect. This term, coined by Lee Ross and his Stanford colleagues, describes the tendency to overestimate the prevalence of one’s own beliefs about the world. As Julia Minson, a Harvard professor who specializes in the science of decision-making, told us: “If I love vanilla ice cream, I will persistently overestimate the proportion of the population that also loves vanilla ice cream.” Or to adapt Minson’s description for a C-suite context: Leaders who love an idea for a new initiative default to assuming that most of their C-suite colleagues must love it as much as they do, and for the same reasons.

When executives don’t realize that they don’t agree, it is often because their conversations aren’t specific enough. Imagine two manufacturing executives who both want to improve the profit margin on their product. One wants to charge customers more; the other wants to lower unit costs. Until these two executives have a conversation that goes deeper than the general notion of “margin improvement,” they won’t discover that they disagree, nor will they have an opportunity to find balance between their approaches. And thanks to the false consensus effect, many months may pass before they come to that crucial realization.

This is an avoidable form of false alignment, but in practice it happens frequently. The lesson here is self-explanatory: Executive teams need to be deep enough in the design and execution of a transformation that they can spot their areas of disagreement and beat the false consensus effect. They need to go further than a broad general goal (“Double revenues!”) or a single big number (“Save $500 million!”). Instead they need to come to a specific agreement on the breakdown of that large goal across levers and business areas, with an understanding of relevant consequences and trade-offs, and determine an approximate timeline for capturing that value. Without that level of detail leaders can’t truly determine whether they agree.

Executives pretend to agree. A more pernicious cause of false alignment is the tendency for people to pretend to agree instead of acknowledging the disagreements they need to have. We remember doing work for a large company with challenging relationships between executives. The executive team had started a specific practice of making decisions as a group: Before formally making any decision, the CEO would go around the table and ask for an explicit verbal agreement from every executive.

On one occasion, for a particular pair of proposals, we heard the following responses to the CEO’s question about whether his team members agreed with the ideas presented:

• One executive said, “I agree with the first proposal but am not aligned with the second.”

• Another executive said, “I am aligned.”

• A third executive said, “I am partly aligned.”

• The chief operating officer summarized by saying, “I think it is clear that we are conceptually aligned.”

The meeting concluded, and all the executives went on their way. Despite the obvious fact that there was real disagreement among these individuals, not one of them was prepared to talk about it.

In another transformation we noticed that people had a habit of concluding meetings by saying, “We are aligned.” When we asked the executives what they had agreed on and what the next steps were, no one could tell us, so we banned people from using the word “alignment”—anyone guilty of saying it in a meeting was fined $5. The fines ultimately funded a celebration for the entire team when a specific goal was achieved.

Why do people behave like that?

The main reason is that humans seem to be hardwired to overestimate how unpleasant it will be to have disagreements. In one striking study, Minson and her Harvard colleagues split several hundred participants into two groups. The first group was asked to imagine what it would be like to watch a short video clip of a leading U.S. senator giving a speech. Participants who identified as conservative were asked to imagine watching a Democratic senator giving a speech, while those who identified as liberal were asked to imagine watching a Republican senator giving a speech. The second group was invited to actually watch a video clip of a senator from an opposing ideology, instead of merely imagining watching it.

The researchers found that the participants tasked with imagining that they were watching the video expected the experience to be significantly worse than it really was. Participants also overestimated their level of disagreement with the senator speaking in the video. Minson and her colleagues gave this phenomenon a name: affective forecasting error. They said that we “expect holders of opposing views to disagree with [us] more dramatically than turns out to be the case.”

For leaders, the trouble arises when their miscalibrated expectations combine with a fear of conflict. Out of concern that they may trigger tensions within the group, which they worry would be unpleasant, team members may seek to paper over their disagreements.

Executives put off resolving their differences. Consider these statements, which we often hear from executives struggling to find true agreement on a proposed change:

• “We don’t have time to debate this further. If we don’t begin now, we’ll have nothing to show by Investor Day.”

• “We need to do something even if it’s not perfect. Something is better than nothing.”

• “We’ll have opportunities to sort out the details later. In the meantime the team can get started and make some progress.”

• “Things will be clearer for us later, once the program is up and running.”

Usually executives making these statements know that they don’t agree and are willing to have open disagreements with one another. But they feel under pressure—either imagined or real—to start some version of the program despite discord. They believe, optimistically, that there will be an opportunity to come to agreement on the most important issues later, once the program is underway.

It is not unreasonable thinking. There are many situations, in life and in business, when the right decision is to just begin. If you want to get in shape, you shouldn’t spend months planning the precise exercises you hope to perform at the gym. Instead the best strategy is to simply get going and do any form of exercise at all. But a transformative organizational change is the wrong time to apply that principle. Plans written around vague or contradictory premises increase confusion rather than decrease it. Once confusion has set in, it’s time-consuming for executives to put things back together and demoralizing for employees who feel they have wasted their time.

We also find that executive team members tend not to return to their disagreements. They get busy with the attempted execution of the change and with other business priorities. Consequently, disagreement lingers far longer than ever expected, and executives move yet farther apart. Deferred agreement is a debt they told themselves they would pay off in weeks, but in practice it takes months or years—if they ever pay it off at all.

The Consequences of False Alignment

When executives don’t have a shared agreement on what is changing, why it’s changing, and how the change will occur, the teams tasked with practically executing the change program will struggle to deliver. We shouldn’t be surprised to learn this. Can you imagine a car manufacturer asking workers to build a vehicle without knowing its make or model? There are three common outcomes for teams in this situation:

Paralysis: lots of talk, no action. When change teams are paralyzed, it is often because they are stuck between the competing priorities of their leaders. Without clear direction they take no meaningful action on any of the different leaders’ visions of the change. Team members come to meetings with a blank sheet of paper and an unanswered question: What are our priorities for this transformation? They spend their time trying to answer the question by listing potential focus areas, proposing strategic reviews (scheduled over many months), and devising complicated prioritization frameworks to reconcile competing visions. They please no one, and they make no progress. When we ask employees how things are going, they often reply with a variation on “The team seems stuck.” Meanwhile, team members become frustrated. They say to one another what one employee said to us: “No one is steering the ship.”

Hyperactivity: lots of action, no progress. On change teams that are unproductively hyperactive, team members run around trying to meet the needs of every single executive at the same time. Without clear direction they endeavor to make headway on multiple visions of the change program from all the different leaders. They show their commitment by devising a huge number of initiatives—but too often many of them are designed to placate certain executives rather than deliver important changes. “We can’t eliminate that initiative—that one is for Joan” is the sort of thing we often hear. The initiatives tend to be shallow and speculative, fail conventional rigor tests, and lack adequate resources (because the available funding is spread too thinly).

Tunnel vision: lots of progress—on the wrong thing. Change teams that have tunnel vision make poor choices because they don’t have a complete strategic picture. Without clear direction team members execute a narrow interpretation of the executive team’s instructions, which doesn’t address the company’s broader needs. Imagine a group of executives who want to improve the customer experience and reduce costs at the same time but who haven’t come to a specific agreement about targets and trade-offs. In the absence of a clear agreement the change team might well assume that the transformation is mostly about cost reduction—and make such good progress that the cost reduction starts to hurt the customer experience.

Reaching True Agreement

How can you counteract your natural tendency (and your colleagues’) to assume that the people around you share your views? How can you start the tricky conversations that you know will lead to disagreement? How can you persuade your colleagues to invest time into properly resolving their differences? We find that the most successful executive teams use a five-step process.

1. Set clear parameters. Winning true agreement begins with clarifying the big questions to be resolved, as well as determining the process for settling them. What conversations will you have over what period of time? Who will be part of which conversations? Will the transformation move forward only once every executive explicitly agrees? Or will the CEO alone make the final decision—and if so, what are the implications for those who disagree?

One executive familiar with these questions is Alexander Lacik. We interviewed Lacik in 2025, during the final year of his tenure as CEO of the Danish jewelry company Pandora.

The 2010s had proved difficult for Pandora. In August 2011 the company lost 65% of its market value in a single day, leading to the departure of its chief executive officer. Over the next seven years three more CEOs followed.

In February 2019, amid another CEO search, Pandora announced a new transformation plan under the name Programme Now. It included about a dozen interconnected workstreams, including a $400 million cost-reduction program (all savings to be reinvested in the business); a global reorganization of talent; a brand relaunch and 360-degree revamp of physical stores to create a more welcoming customer experience; a reduction in an excessive number of marketing promotions that were negatively affecting brand equity; an overhaul of digital-marketing, personalization, and loyalty programs; and a new go-to-market model to replace loose product groups with six consumer-facing collections.

When Lacik began his work as CEO, in April 2019, he determined that the already-announced transformation had approximately the right components—at least on paper. But Lacik observed a crucial missing ingredient: focus and consistency in the actual work of change.

“When I arrived,” he told us, “I counted 46 priorities for the management team—let alone what was happening underneath them.” Lacik saw that he needed better agreement within his management team on exactly what Programme Now was about.

Lacik began by bringing his top team together for a two-day off-site to address the problem. He recalled, “I told people that we weren’t walking out of the door until we had got our priorities back down.” He did not specify which of the 46 priorities should be kept—that was up for debate. Instead he emphasized that the team should conclude the discussion with a full commitment to just 12 of them.

2. Provoke an early exchange. It’s important to remember that early unanimous support is just as likely a bad sign as it is a good sign. When we interviewed former admiral Bill Lescher, who led the U.S. Navy’s Get Real, Get Better transformation, he told us that in early stages of change, he looks for “well-informed decisions by accountable leaders, not consensus decisions. I do not expect every stakeholder to love every decision. I fully expect every stakeholder to be thrilled with the process by which we make the decisions, with each voice clearly heard.”

You need to make the case for change. Say exactly what you are proposing and why. Set out structured arguments in written documents. Create opportunities for leaders to register their first thoughts. Ask them to articulate their initial position—what they clearly agree with, what they clearly disagree with, and what they feel unsure about. You want this information as early as possible. You’ll get the best information if you ask people to write down their initial reactions rather than vocalize them in a group, as writing independently minimizes groupthink.

For this to work, however, you need to invite dissent. Keep reminding people that you welcome contrary views—that they have a responsibility to the company to voice disagreement. Ask questions that explicitly call for differences in opinion. Celia Moore and Kate Coombs, behavioral scientists at Imperial College London, suggest asking questions like, “What could go wrong with this approach?” rather than, “What do you think?” As they explain, “This subtle shift frames disagreement as something the leader desires—and people are wired to give leaders what they want.”

At Pandora, Lacik encouraged the group at that first off-site to voice their reservations. As he recalled: “It was like an open boxing match. I invited everyone to have an opinion on every priority.” The group went through all 46 priorities, one by one, to ensure that there was an opportunity for opinions to be heard on each. The executive responsible for each priority was asked to explain and defend it in front of the group, guaranteeing that it received the best possible argument from the individual with the most expertise on it. The team then formally voted on which priorities should stay and which should go.

3. Have a quality debate. Leaders need to create time and space for executives to learn more about change programs and to seek clarification on specific points. It’s your fellow executives’ chance to understand proposals in their own way and in their own time. It also allows them to come to grips with what exactly will be expected from each of them personally. This is best done outside a group meeting. Instead, arrange informal one-on-ones. This process will feel time-consuming and inefficient, which is not surprising as it is in many ways a negotiation, but it is an occasion for leaders to identify where to draw red lines and where to compromise.

At Pandora, Lacik rallied his management team around a clarifying notion of the company’s brand. In his view Pandora needed to recommit to its customers’ needs. “We agreed that the basic human need we were serving was commemoration: commemoration of good grades or an important birthday or a first job—something that was meaningful to the customer,” he told us. “We agreed to focus on serving this need by offering jewelry with meaning. The whole purpose of the company emanated from that idea.”

For debate to be productive it’s important to be honest about how much agreement and disagreement you observe among executives as the process unfolds. Also remember the false consensus effect: You need to get deep enough into the substance of the proposed change that there is ample material for your colleagues to disagree with. (Few will disagree with your proposal to find savings in the operating budget. Many will disagree with your proposal to find savings in their operating budgets.)

So if you think the team is not yet where it needs to be, say so. It’s better to say, “We are not yet agreed,” than to gloss over the differences by saying, “I think we’re speaking the same language,” or using some other euphemism.

4. Come to a formal verdict. When the moment is right, bring your executives together in a formal “final decision” meeting. Ask for each individual’s agreement rather than the group’s agreement. (This lowers the probability of passive resistance—especially from high performers, who may believe they can get away with it.) Decide whether and how the change program will proceed, consistent with the decision rights you established at the outset. If everyone has truly agreed, formally document the decision. At a minimum write down in simple terms what has been agreed. In addition, use some form of physical ritual to underscore that unity of purpose. For example, you can ask the members of your executive team to sign their names at the bottom of the document—just like on a bank check.

Finally, recognize any remaining concerns and make a plan to return to them. Even in a room with 100% formal agreement it is unrealistic to think that every issue around the table will have been resolved. Where executives have generously offered agreement despite continued discomfort with parts of the proposal, show them respect and recognize their commitment to the process of reaching agreement.

In the case of Pandora, Lacik’s management team marked their agreement by formally adopting a single success metric that counted revenue growth only from end-customer demand (as opposed to demand from intermediary retailers) and only from stores that had been open for at least 12 months, as well as from Pandora Online. In adopting that metric the team was committing to do the hard work of improving Pandora’s underlying relationships with consumers.

5. Send a unified message. Executives often comment that members of their teams are texting them during meetings asking for updates. This is not an effective communication strategy for any change effort. You do not want each executive’s team getting its own version of events. Nor do you want to count on the leaders’ cascade of the message through their respective organizations—it becomes impossible to guarantee that everyone who needs to hear it will hear it. The decision needs to be broadcast simultaneously in a single format to everyone who needs to know. As Lacik pointed out to us: “When you’re communicating with 30,000 people in a supply chain, you need to be simple. You can have all the fancy analysis, but if people don’t get it, they won’t execute it!”

Facing True Disagreement

What if you’ve tried everything—set clear parameters, provoked an early exchange, conducted what you thought was a quality debate—and you still haven’t been able to persuade some people on your leadership team to truly agree with your vision for change? You have four options.

Disagree Again

This is the first, best, and cheapest option. Getting agreement on something as complex as a transformation takes persistence. We often see executives throw their hands up in despair, saying something like, “Sam will never agree,” only to discover that Sam was really just looking for one minor concession. Don’t give up too easily.

Subtract and Defer

If you’ve truly exhausted your options by engaging in further disagreement, there is no shame in subtracting parts of the transformation on which you can’t reach agreement. It is usually better to implement a smaller change on which your executive team does agree than it is to press ahead with a larger change on which you don’t all agree. And after seeing the success of a scaled-back transformation, skeptical executives often end up accepting what they had previously opposed.

Offer an Attractive Exit

If you’ve reached the end of your possibilities through more disagreement and if you can’t (or shouldn’t) subtract and defer, consider offering executives who hold minority positions an attractive way out. Give them an option to retire early or take an extended transition plan.

Proceed With a Plan

At times external forces beyond your control will compel you to start a change program before you are ready. For example, the board and shareholders may have decided that the company is going to be put up for sale by a certain date and that an immediate cost-reduction program is needed to prepare the company for that negotiation. If that kind of situation happens to you, understand that every day you go without true agreement is a day you are incurring risk and missing opportunities. It should be a top priority to settle the disagreement while executing the change.

For example, a unified broadcast might say, “We agreed to execute the program described on page 2 of the briefing document. We need to act now to respond to the threat from our new competitors. We agreed that we’ll start making the arrangements immediately and take it to the board in August. We agreed that Timo will serve as chief transformation officer for the program. We agreed that the budget for the program is $X, and its EBIT target is $Y. We haven’t yet agreed who the workstream leaders or initiative owners will be—that’s to come. We will meet again as a team in July to make the next set of decisions about how we’ll implement the program.”

At Pandora, Lacik captured the strategic shift he wanted in a simple slogan that was communicated to all the company’s stores: “Moments First.” That slogan communicated to the employees in each store that their number one priority should be jewelry that customers could use to commemorate important moments in their lives—most of all, bracelets. To convey how serious he was about this Lacik even required some stores to remove products that were not part of the refreshed Moments campaign from shop windows and replace them with bracelets and charms that were. At the same time he set daily sales targets in every store—specifically for bracelets to signal that they were the most important products for the company’s future.

. . .

To lead a transformation, leaders must take the time to get their team to truly agree on why change is needed, what those changes will be, and how they will occur. There is often more time than leaders think there is to get that right, even in high-pressure situations, and if executives have reached true agreement on a change, there typically will be opportunities to accelerate later. By contrast, programs without an up-front agreement encounter significant delays during execution, requiring far more time and energy than would have been spent on debate at the beginning.

Copyright 2026 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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