When Alignment Fails, Check the Decision Rights

Change efforts stall not because the strategy is wrong but because the team never agreed on who decides what, according to a Harvard Business Review piece by Julia Dhar and co-authors. The article, adapted from "The False Alignment Trap," argues that teams often move ahead assuming shared priorities, only to hit friction when unspoken expectations surface.

The fix, Dhar writes, is to define the exact decisions that need to be made, name the person who owns each one, and spell out how they will be made, before execution starts. That means setting clear parameters for what counts as a decision versus an input, and making the distinction explicit rather than implicit.