Alignment Decays Faster Than You Think

November 24, 2024

Organizational alignment is not a one-time event but a continuously decaying resource. The moment people leave an alignment meeting, they begin drifting apart and the compounding effect of small misalignments can be catastrophic.

"A 1 degree deviation in course of a rocket heading to the sun means it will miss the sun by 1.2 million miles. A lack of alignment compounds quickly." Jean-Michel Lemieux

The tech industry has an almost religious devotion to autonomy. "Hire great people and get out of their way" is repeated so often it feels axiomatic. But as Jean-Michel Lemieux learned leading engineering at Atlassian and later Shopify, prioritizing autonomy over alignment is a recipe for drift. His boss Scott Farquhar had to tell him: stop trying to prove you can handle things alone, and "cheat use my brain to help you."

The trap is that autonomy is easy to measure and feels good, while alignment is hard to measure and requires ongoing, sometimes uncomfortable, conversations. Most companies align superficially they agree on high-level goals but leave the "how" unexamined. Yet strategy lives in the how: which technologies to use, which customers to serve, what to build into the core versus an app. These are decisions that interact with each other in complex ways, and getting them wrong quietly compounds.

The practical antidote is what Netflix called "highly aligned, loosely coupled" but implementing it requires deliberate habits: paired leadership sessions, async strategy notes twice a week, and a decision tree that calibrates how much alignment each decision type needs. The implementation stays autonomous; the strategic thinking stays coupled.

Takeaway: Without continuous alignment, autonomy does not produce independence it produces drift.