There is a moment in almost every executive strategy session that fascinates me.

The slide changes. Heads nod. Someone says the direction feels right. The room relaxes slightly. The energy shifts from tension to forward motion.

It looks like alignment.

And sometimes it is.

But often, what I’m watching is something quieter  a decision moving forward without having truly been metabolized by the people responsible for carrying it.

The Illusion of Alignment in Executive Meetings

In U.S. executive teams especially, misalignment rarely shows up as open resistance. It doesn’t erupt into conflict. It rarely sounds dramatic. Instead, it hides behind professionalism.

Leaders are thoughtful. Measured. Careful with political capital. No one wants to be the outlier. No one wants to slow the room down unnecessarily. And in high-performing environments, disagreement can feel like friction rather than contribution.

So the room moves on, because the leaders feel that is what senior leadership expects in order to show they are “on board.” To not do that might be seen as resistance. As someone once said at McKinsey, it could be a “career-limiting move.”

And so everyone signals agreement.

A Real Example of Hidden Misalignment in Action

I worked recently with a leadership team at a mid-sized company that had just declared a bold strategic pivot. The CEO articulated it clearly. The rationale made sense. The room nodded. The language of commitment was used. By the end of the session, everyone agreed they were aligned.

Three weeks later, progress was uneven.

Manufacturing had barely adjusted capacity assumptions. Sales was still incentivized around legacy products. HR had not shifted hiring priorities. Finance was modeling conservatively, as if this were still an experiment rather than a directional shift.

When we unpacked it, no one had intentionally resisted.

They had simply left the room with different interpretations.

Some believed the pivot was a signal to explore new markets cautiously. Others believed it was an immediate reallocation of capital and focus. A few assumed implementation would be staged next year. The CEO assumed urgency had been understood.

Everyone believed they were aligned.

They weren’t.

How Polite Agreement Masks Strategic Risk

What had been missing wasn’t intelligence or commitment. It was shared interpretation.

Hidden misalignment doesn’t live in whether people like the strategy. It lives in how they define it.

Two executives can leave the same conversation carrying completely different mental models about what just happened.

One assumes resources will be reallocated. Another assumes teams will absorb the work.
One believes risk tolerance has shifted. Another assumes guardrails remain unchanged.
One sees transformation. Another sees a pilot.

None of them are being disingenuous.

They are operating from assumptions that were never made visible.

And because the meeting felt productive, the organization assumes alignment has been achieved.

Why Execution Breakdowns Often Begin in the Strategy Room

The fracture shows up later.

It shows up when timelines stretch.
When enthusiasm cools.
When execution feels uneven across functions.
When someone quietly says, “That’s not what I thought we were doing.”

By then, the strategy gets questioned. Or the team’s discipline gets questioned.

But often the strategy wasn’t the problem.

The surface alignment was.

What True Executive Alignment Actually Requires

There is something particularly American about this dynamic. Many U.S. executive cultures value momentum. Efficiency. Decisiveness. Meetings that end on a clear forward note.

What we don’t always value is the slower work of pressing into ambiguity long enough to expose differences in interpretation.

The deeper questions are harder:

Are we aligned on the level of risk this requires?
Are we aligned on what we are willing to stop?
Are we aligned on how this changes decision rights or incentives?
Are we aligned on the urgency?

Those conversations can feel destabilizing in a room full of peers.

So instead, teams close the deck and move forward.

The irony is that surfacing misalignment early is far less destabilizing than discovering it mid-execution.

Real alignment is not the absence of tension.

It is the resolution of tension through clarity.

If your executive team keeps experiencing execution breakdowns after strong strategy sessions, it may not be a performance issue.

It may be that misalignment was polite enough to go unnoticed.

And polite misalignment is one of the most expensive dynamics in American executive culture.