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 partially 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. The strategy that emerged from that process was genuinely shared, because the understanding behind it was genuinely shared: built collectively, with the tensions visible, the reasoning preserved, and the genuine uncertainty acknowledged.
The sequence that changes outcomes
Most change programmes follow a fixed sequence: strategy developed by leadership, then communicated to the organisation, then managed as change. The understanding that the strategy requires is assumed to be transmissible downward.
Collective sensemaking reverses the sequence at the critical point: the understanding is built before the strategy is fixed. The people who will carry the change are part of building the understanding that shapes it — not consulted after the decision is made, not briefed once the communication plan is written, but genuinely involved in the deliberation that produces the strategic direction.
This is not consensus-building. It does not mean that the final decision requires everyone's agreement. It means that the people who will be asked to act on the strategy had the opportunity to contribute to the understanding that shaped it. That is a different kind of ownership from the kind produced by communication.
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 programme 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. The failed implementation, the resistance that forms around misunderstanding, the change programme that is redesigned twice before it works — these are the costs of alignment as communication. Building understanding first is the alternative.