When I was working in engine development at Renault, I watched five teams ruin a perfectly good engine.
Each team had a legitimate goal. The performance team wanted maximum acceleration. The emissions team needed to limit that acceleration to meet pollution standards. The safety team required a power buffer for auxiliary systems that the customer would never notice. The regulatory team needed the engine to pass homologation. And the customer experience team wanted the car to feel responsive and smooth.
Five teams. Five legitimate priorities. Each one pulling the tuning in a different direction. And each one, individually, was doing excellent work. Every person was responsible for their area, and they took that seriously. Everyone was pulling the fire over their own potato (as we say in Romania).
The problem was that nobody was responsible for the whole car.
My wife Florina is a doctor. She knows nothing about engines. I used to put her in the driver’s seat as my test. She didn’t care about the power buffer. She didn’t care about the emissions target. She didn’t care which team won the internal argument. She cared that the car behaved as expected and got her from A to B. She was the client. And the client is a driver, not a subsystem stakeholder.
They all over-optimized for their own area and forgot that the client was actually a driver.
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This is the Alignment Gap. And it’s different from the Clarity Gap in a way that matters.
The Clarity Gap is about not knowing where you’re going. The Alignment Gap is about everyone knowing where they’re going, but those destinations not being the same place. It’s the gap between individual clarity and collective direction.
The executive says: “They aren’t aligned. We need better communication from the top.”
The middle manager says: “Every department is pulling in a different direction. I can see it. I just don’t have the authority to fix it.”
And here’s the part that makes this gap so persistent: alignment is not a communication problem. It’s a design problem. Strategy arrives as slogans. Middle managers have to convert slogans into trade-offs without the authority to change the constraints. They’re the ones who have to decide: if we can’t have both performance and emissions, which one gives? And often, nobody told them.
I saw a simpler version of this at Volvo. Turned around in my chair one day and realized a colleague was working on the exact same thing I was working on. Two people. Same task. Neither of us knew the other was doing it. That’s not a communication failure. That’s a design failure. The system had no mechanism to make the duplication visible.
There are three ways misalignment shows up. Duplication (two people doing the same thing). Collision (two people doing opposite things). And evaporation (something critical that nobody is doing because everyone assumed someone else was). In my experience, organizations spend most of their energy on collision, because that’s the one that creates visible conflict. Duplication and evaporation are quieter. They bleed resources and time without anyone noticing.
There’s a language diagnostic I use. Listen to how people in a team talk about other internal teams. The moment someone says “they” about another department instead of “we,” that’s your signal. The way they talk to you is the way they talk to each other. “Us and them” is not a personality conflict. It’s the sound of misalignment.
Alignment is the second muscle in the organizational core. When clarity breaks down, alignment becomes impossible. And when alignment breaks down, effort doesn’t disappear. It just stops producing results. Everyone is busy. Everyone is working hard. And the car doesn’t drive the way the customer expected.
More to come.
Florin
P.S. Next edition: The Accountability Gap. When you own the result but you don’t own any of the decisions that determine it.