Design · 06 / 24
Turning intent into organizational coherence
Goal Alignment is the discipline of keeping a chosen direction coherent as it moves through different functions and levels, so that the goal still means the same thing when it reaches real trade-offs.
It resolves the tension between over-specifying goals until people stop thinking and under-specifying them until judgment becomes unsafe.
Each function can rationally justify its own interpretation of a goal, growth, caution, delay, or constraint, while the organization as a whole drifts because no shared frame survived the translation. People rarely rebel against strategy; they quietly reinterpret it to fit their own context.
The competency requires enough clarity that people can act intelligently without guessing what the organization really means, while preserving enough autonomy that alignment does not collapse into rigid compliance. It depends on precision about whether a gap reflects missing skill, judgment, or capacity.
This competency has its own chapter in the second edition.
Second Edition — available now
Twenty-four competencies, read through the DOES cycle and the Levels of Work. The full architecture, chapter by chapter.
Available in paperback and Kindle.