This Isn't Misalignment

Under pressure, organizations don’t behave randomly. They fall back to how they’re built.

This is the final installment in our first series, and is meant to help you identify patterns that repeat, and show you where they actually come from.

The last issue focused on getting us to look somewhere other than where the evidence of a problem shows up when trying to resolve issues. I’m picking up from there. 

Once you start looking earlier in the process, other things become easier to see. The points where work breaks down are often the same points where teams are pushing back against each other the hardest. And those interactions tend to get described the same way. Teams aren't aligned. They have different priorities. One wants to move faster. Another wants more certainty before acting.

From the outside, it looks like a people problem. So the natural response is to get everyone on the same page. Leaders push shared goals, encourage more collaboration, try to get teams working the same way. The assumption is that if everyone agrees on what matters, the friction goes away.

It rarely does.

The tension is usually coming from the work itself.

In a manufacturing company, sales and operations run into this all the time. Sales is talking to customers every day. They know what it takes to close a deal, and sometimes that means promising a custom delivery date to get it done. Operations is managing production schedules, materials, and a shop floor that doesn't flex easily. When a custom order comes in with a timeline operations can't hit, the conflict starts.

Sales says operations is too rigid. Operations says sales is making promises without checking first. Leadership gets everyone in a room to hash it out.

But sales isn't wrong to respond to what customers need. And operations isn't wrong to protect a schedule that keeps everything else running. Both teams are doing exactly what their job demands of them.

The problem is that nobody ever decided how those two things should work when they collide. When can sales commit to a custom timeline? What do they need to check first? Who can approve an exception, and how fast can that happen? Without clear answers, every custom order becomes its own argument. The same fight plays out over and over because the company never actually resolved it. They just kept having it.

That's what creates the inconsistency. The same situation gets handled differently depending on who's in the room and how much pressure is on that week. Over time, that starts to feel personal. Like the teams just don't get along.

It’s not a people problem. It's a missing rulebook.

The fix isn't to force everyone into the same way of working. It's to define what happens when different ways of working run into each other. Where does speed win? Where does checking first win? Who makes that call? Once those questions have real answers, they get built into how work actually moves, instead of being argued out fresh every time.

When that's in place, the dynamic changes. Teams aren't negotiating the same tradeoffs over and over. They're working inside a structure that's already made those calls for them.

What feels like misalignment is usually just the absence of that structure. Once it exists, friction that felt personal starts to become manageable.

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