Organisations frequently claim strategic alignment while simultaneously solving fundamentally different problems across different parts of the enterprise. The leadership team believes the organisation is moving in a single direction. The business units are actually moving in five.
Strategic coherence is not achieved through alignment messaging. It requires structural decisions about trade-offs, sequencing, and resource allocation. Without those structural decisions, alignment is an illusion — a shared language that masks divergent priorities.
The Alignment Illusion
Strategic alignment is among the most frequently claimed and least frequently achieved conditions in enterprise change. Organisations measure alignment through surveys: “Do you understand the strategy?” Leadership meetings affirm alignment: “We’re all on the same page.” Change communications reinforce alignment: “Everyone is working toward the same vision.”
But ask what people are actually prioritising, and the alignment dissolves.1
The finance team is optimising for cost reduction. The innovation team is optimising for market positioning. The operations team is optimising for stability. The customer success team is optimising for retention. Each team is pursuing a legitimate strategic objective. Each team can articulate how their priorities serve the overall strategy. And each team is, in practice, solving a different strategic problem. Strategic coherence requires more than alignment language. It requires explicit choice about which strategic objective takes precedence when priorities compete — which they always do when resources are finite.
How Strategy Becomes Incoherent
Strategic incoherence emerges through a specific sequence of organisational decisions.
First, the organisation articulates a multi-dimensional strategy. The strategy contains multiple legitimate objectives: growth, profitability, innovation, customer satisfaction, operational excellence. Leadership values each of these. None is abandoned in the strategy statement.
Second, the organisation decentralises execution. Each business unit, function, or team is given authority to pursue the strategy according to their context. This is sensible delegation. It enables local adaptation. It avoids the bottleneck of central approval for every decision.
Third, strategic incoherence emerges. When resources compete, each team rationally prioritises the objective that is most salient to their context. The cost-cutting team cuts costs. The growth team invests in growth. The two teams are in genuine conflict, and the organisation has no structural mechanism to resolve the conflict because the strategy legitimises both. The organisation has no governance that says: “When growth and cost-cutting are in tension, cost-cutting prevails” or vice versa. Instead, the organisation has alignment language that says both matter.
Fourth, the organisation experiences the consequences. Innovation is starved by cost discipline. Customer experience deteriorates when pursuit of efficiency overrides pursuit of satisfaction. Employees experience cognitive dissonance as they’re asked to pursue incompatible objectives. The organisation becomes increasingly difficult to navigate because the rules keep changing depending on which priority currently dominates.
At this point, the organisation frequently responds by reasserting alignment. New strategy sessions. New messaging. New communication campaigns. The organisation redoubles its commitment to alignment language while leaving the structural problem untouched.
Strategic Coherence as Governance
Strategic coherence requires explicit governance decisions that are separate from strategy articulation. Strategy articulates what the organisation cares about. Governance decides what happens when what the organisation cares about comes into conflict. Governance answers three structural questions that strategy does not:
When strategic objectives are in tension, which takes precedence? This is not a question of which is “more important.” All legitimate strategic objectives are important. The question is: in real resource allocation decisions, which objective gets the scarce resource? The organisation must be willing to say this explicitly. Not in strategy language (where all objectives appear equal), but in governance language (where trade-offs are acknowledged).2
Who has authority to make trade-off decisions? If every team can make trade-off decisions independently, the result is the divergence described above. Strategic coherence requires a governance body that has authority to enforce consistency in how trade-offs are resolved. This is not about removing team autonomy. It is about making trade-off authority transparent and consistently applied.
How are trade-off decisions reviewed and adjusted? Strategic priorities shift over time. The governance structure must have a mechanism to periodically review whether the current trade-off priorities still serve the evolving strategic intent. This is not strategy revision. It is governance maintenance. Without governance answers to these three questions, strategic coherence is impossible. The organisation has strategy but not strategy enforcement.
The Illusion Persists Because It Serves Everyone Strategic incoherence persists partly because incoherence itself is useful.
When the strategy is incoherent, everyone can claim alignment with it. The finance team pursuing cost discipline is aligned. The innovation team pursuing growth is aligned. The operations team pursuing stability is aligned. The incoherence of the strategy is precisely what allows each team to believe they’re pursuing the organisation’s priorities.3
Making the strategy coherent requires someone to be wrong. It requires explicit trade-offs that some teams will lose. It requires governance decisions that constrain some teams’ autonomy. This is uncomfortable work. It is often easier to maintain the illusion of alignment through messaging while allowing the structural incoherence to persist.
But the cost of the illusion accumulates. The longer the organisation operates with incoherent strategic governance, the more difficult coordination becomes. The more decision-making gets pushed to escalation points that have no authority to resolve them.4 The more energy goes into negotiating what the strategy “really means” rather than into executing it. Strategic coherence is not achieved through alignment communication. It is achieved through governance clarity about trade-offs, authority, and review.
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Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning. Allyn and Bacon. Argyris’s distinction between espoused theory and theory-in-use is directly applicable here: organisations espouse alignment at the level of stated values and shared vision, while actual prioritisation behaviour — where people commit their attention, resources, and discretionary effort — follows a different logic. Alignment surveys measure espoused theory; watching what teams actually deprioritise under resource pressure reveals theory-in-use. The gap between the two is where strategic incoherence lives. ↩︎
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Simons, R. (1995). Levers of Control: How Managers Use Innovative Control Systems to Drive Strategic Renewal. Harvard Business School Press. Simons argues that strategy without explicit control mechanisms — particularly boundary systems that define what is not acceptable and diagnostic systems that monitor strategic performance — remains aspiration rather than operational guidance. Trade-off governance is precisely the missing boundary system: it answers the question of which objectives are non-negotiable when they compete, making the strategy actionable rather than merely aspirational. ↩︎
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Pfeffer, J. (1981). Power in Organizations. Pitman. Pfeffer’s analysis of organisational power shows that strategic ambiguity serves political functions: when strategy is incoherent, every faction can claim alignment with it, and the organisation avoids the conflict that explicit trade-offs would require. This is not incidental — the political utility of incoherence is part of what sustains it. Making strategy coherent requires someone to be wrong, and the actors who would be wrong have both the incentive and the organisational position to resist governance clarity. ↩︎
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Chandler, A. D. (1962). Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise. MIT Press. Chandler’s foundational argument that structure must follow strategy has a corollary: when strategy is incoherent, the structural mechanisms for coordination and authority resolution cannot be coherently designed. Governance bodies without clear trade-off authority are structurally incapable of resolving the escalations they receive; the decisions get pushed not because of individual failure but because the structural architecture of authority was never aligned with the incoherence of the strategy it was meant to serve. ↩︎