When work is breaking down, I can almost guarantee that the people doing that work are trying to do a good job. The breakdown is almost always happening somewhere else: Different definitions of done, different ideas about what matters, different assumptions about who decides. That’s misalignment, and it’s easy to miss until it’s already causing expensive repercussions.

Misalignment often looks like work that never quite lands, meetings where everyone nods and nothing changes, and rework that nobody can fully explain. It compounds as it moves through an organization.

It is possible that leadership articulates priorities clearly enough at the top, but each layer translates those priorities through its own pressures and context. Departments convert strategy into local objectives. Managers communicate expectations through the lens of what they're being held accountable for. By the time the work is actually happening, definitions of success have drifted, sometimes far enough that teams are producing very different outputs while believing they're solving the same problem.

In Human Performance Technology terms, this is an information and feedback problem. People can't calibrate their work to expectations that haven't been made concrete enough to function.

The costly part isn't just the rework. It's what the rework does to people over time. When effort consistently misses the mark for reasons nobody can diagnose, people stop bringing their best. They hedge. They do what gets approved rather than what moves the needle. Misalignment doesn't just waste time. It shapes behavior in directions nobody intended.

The Misalignment Audit starts with a practical question: Do the people who depend on each other define success the same way?

That question, asked systematically, is usually enough to find where the drift is happening.

Kate Graham

Principal, Humaneering Performance

Organizations tend to think of misalignment as a communication problem, which leads them to solve it with more communication: longer meetings, more documentation without evaluation, or another alignment call.

Communication alone isn’t going to cut through misalignment. It takes clarity.

Here’s the gap: people can communicate until they are blue in the face, but that’s not going to amount to real change if the conversations they're having are operating at the wrong level.

"We want high-quality work delivered efficiently" sounds like alignment. It isn't. Alignment sounds like: "The output is a two-page decision brief, ready by Thursday, addressed to the ops director, focused on trade-offs rather than process." One of those statements gives people something to aim at. The other gives them a vibe.

Vibes are all well and good for generic or personal uses, but if you can’t successfully embed that vibe into a functioning whole, it’s isn’t going to help you as much as you might think.

When expectations live at the vibe level, people fill in the gaps with their own assumptions. Projects stall while teams sort out who owns a decision. Work gets revised repeatedly because different leaders expect different outcomes. Employees spend time re-explaining what they thought the assignment required. None of that shows up as a project budget line-item, but it is eating away at the hours nonetheless.

All of it is real, and it compounds. Rework, missed deadlines, damaged relationships, turnover from people who get tired of trying to hit a target that keeps moving, and the culture drag that happens as a result.

The deeper cost is what it does to trust. Teams start assuming that others aren't delivering what was promised. Leaders question why results vary across departments. The root problem is usually just that success was never defined the same way twice. When outputs are defined consistently and communicated clearly, that friction mostly disappears. Decisions get easier. Work moves forward.

It might sound like a dream, but it is as easy as setting clear expectations at the outset and sticking to them.

Use this when a project or working relationship feels slightly off and you can't quite name why. Pick one active situation and work through these five points:

Run this scan at the start of a project or whenever something starts to feel stuck. You're not looking for someone to blame. You're looking for the structural gap that's generating friction.

Where do priorities or definitions of success drift the most in your organization?

Pick one place where that drift is actively costing you something: between leaders and teams, between departments, between the work that gets measured and the work that actually matters, etc.. That's where the audit starts.