Why Misalignment from Senior Leadership Rolls Downhill

Your Organisation says it's aligned. It probably isn't.

And the problem starts at the top.

Zora Artis and Wayne Aspland have spent 7 years studying the gap between what leadership teams say they're doing and what's actually happening inside organizations. And their findings are uncomfortable. 

In their latest global study, drawing on interviews with 55 CEOs and senior executives across five continents, they found that leaders routinely leave strategy meetings carrying completely different understandings of the direction they just agreed on. 

Nobody admits it. And communications professionals get handed the impossible job of aligning everyone else around a strategy the leadership team hasn't genuinely aligned on themselves. 

In this episode, we break down why the gap has barely moved in seven years, what's actually driving it, and what communications professionals are uniquely positioned to do about it. 

The full findings are being presented IABC World Conference 2026 in Toronto this June.

Register 

https://wc.iabc.com/ 

Download the full Report and Infographic Summary here.

Listen For

4:11 What does true organizational alignment actually mean beyond agreement?
7:44 Why do leaders think they’re aligned but act differently after meetings?
9:09 How do fear and ego silently destroy alignment in executive teams?
12:18 What is “glass head syndrome” and why does it derail strategy execution?
17:18 Is AI making organizational alignment better or worse?

Guests:

Zora Artis

Website Artis Advisory | Website Clear Leaders | Email | LinkedIn

Wayne Aspland

Website Clear Leaders | Email | LinkedIn 

Doug

Substack | Website | LinkedIn

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Transcript

Emily Page (00:00):
Back in the early '60s, the American government gathered some of the most intelligent, experienced people in the world into a room to decide the fate of a foreign nation. They talked, they nodded, and when they left the room, they all had agreed. What happened next became one of the most studied failures in the history of leadership.

Doug Downs (00:25):
It was April 1961. John Kennedy had been president for 89 days. The plan was not his. Eisenhower built it, now Kennedy owned it. 1400 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA would land on a beach called Playa Giron. Their arrival would trigger a popular uprising. Ordinary Cubans desperate to be free of Castro were waiting for a spark. The exiles would provide it. Castro would fall, it would be over in days. Kennedy gathered his advisers, the joint chiefs, the CIA director, some of the smartest people in America who went around the room and nobody said stop. They all agreed. Well, it was not agreement, it was silence wearing agreement's clothes. Arthur Schlesinger had doubts. He wrote them in a memo which he handed to the president privately. He said nothing in the room. Dean Rusk had reservations. He kept them to himself. The invasion lasted three days.

(01:22):
 There was no popular uprising among Cubans. They were not waiting for a spark. That intelligence was wrong and several people in those meetings knew it was shaky at the time. Nobody said so out loud. Kennedy also cancelled US air support at the last minute to hide America's involvement, stripping the exiles of the one thing the military had been counting on. Castro's forces were waiting. The exiles were pinned on the beach with nowhere to go. About a hundred were killed, 1200 captured. Castro ransomed them back for $53 million worth of food and medicine. It was a complete and very public humiliation broadcast to the entire world at the height of the Cold War. Kennedy said it was the most important lesson of his presidency. You can fill a room with brilliant people who all believe they are aligned. Every single one of them can be carrying a different understanding of what they just agreed to, and nobody will say a word.

(02:21):
 Today on Stories and Strategies, what happens when your leadership team leaves the room and nobody actually agreed? My name is Doug Downs, my guest this week, Zora Artis and Wayne Aspland joining today from Melbourne. Zora, Wayne, sunny, even though it's your autumn, right? Sunny day today.

Wayne Aspland (02:52):
Beautiful.

Zora Artis (02:53):
It's a perfect day.

Doug Downs (02:54):
Perfect day. I'm still shovelling snow where I'm at. Just a little bit, but I'm still clear. Zora Artis, you are a CEO, executive coach, and co founder of Clear Leaders, who has spent three decades helping leadership teams do the uncomfortable work of genuine alignment. That's a keynote here today. Turning competing priorities into clear decisions when the stakes are at their highest. You're also an IABC fellow, a research fellow with the Team Flow Institute, and one of the most recognised voices globally on the intersection of leadership, strategy, and communication. Wayne Aspland, you're a leadership strategy and change communication professional with more than 20 years advising boards and executive teams, and one of Australia's most sought after voices on building AI capability inside organisations responsibly. You've published nine research papers on AI, strategy, communication, and change, and this is together your third global study on strategic alignment completed with Zora.

(03:56):
 So for both of you, this time you interviewed more than 50 senior executives, I think it was actually 55, across five continents. And before we get into what you found, help us understand what exactly you were trying to measure here.

Wayne Aspland (04:11):
I often think with alignment of a very famous JFK story, which is the cleaner at NASA. And I don't know if you've heard it before, but JFK is walking through NASA.

Doug Downs (04:23):
I have.

Wayne Aspland (04:24):
He sees a cleaner carrying a broom and he says, "So what are you doing?" And he says, "Well, I'm helping to put humans on the moon."

Doug Downs (04:32):
Awesome.

Wayne Aspland (04:33):
And that really is the thrust of what alignment is. Companies, at the end of the day, they succeed when their people all pull together around a common goal. And that's why this janitor story is so important. He's not just carrying a broom. He's putting people on the moon, and that's incredible. Alignment is when people across an organisation share a genuine understanding of where it's going and why. And that understanding shows up in how they make decisions and how they do their work. So alignment, there's actually three dimensions to it, which are structural, behavioural, and relational. The structural is about, do your systems and processes, like for example, reward and recognition systems actually encourage alignment in an organisation, or do they actually, in reality, encourage silos and all sorts of different views? The second thing is behavioural and it's, are your leaders and people, are they having the right conversations?

(05:42):
 Are they making the right decisions? Are leaders role modelling alignment in reality? And often they're not. And then relational, relational is actually one of the most interesting things that came out of these interviews, which is it's about trust and listening and psychological safety.

(06:03):
 People don't commit to a strategy because you gave it to them. They commit because they trust the leaders, they trust the direction moving forward. They commit because they choose to at the end of the day. And that's a really important part of building alignment. If you think about where, or the issues that misalignment creates, it robs us of time. We spend all our time firefighting things and reworking things and not prioritising properly. We heard stories in the interviews of companies where there was a major project going on in one part of the business, and without anyone realising it, there was a major project going on in another part of the business, and they were actually the same thing. The other thing is speed. You end up with slower decision making and delayed execution because of misalignment. And to what I was talking about before with relational, if you're not aligned, you damage relationships.

(07:13):
 There's not the trust that should exist in organisations. You get higher levels of disengagement. You have poorer employee retention. So this is a really important topic.

Doug Downs (07:25):
So Zora, there's a gap happening here. They gather, they nod their heads, they seem to have a shared understanding, they leave the room, and something happens when they leave the room. I don't know what it is, but this time you zoomed in a bit closer on the why and what the gap is.

Zora Artis (07:44):
Yeah, that's right. Well, it's quite interesting because when they're in the room, they're nodding their heads, they've been involved in the process, but have they really understood it? Because people come to their workplace with their own mental models, their own perceptions, their own biases, their own lived experience, cultures, all that sort of thing. And that impacts how they make decisions, how they interpret things. If that's not explored, then you don't really understand whether or not people have genuinely understood what's being discussed in the room and have they had the opportunity to share their perspectives. So in a lot of cases, they're nodding, there's politeness, there's the assumption that they are in agreement. And so when they think that they're in agreement, they assume they're aligned and alignment doesn't necessarily mean agreement. So that room is, to some degree, operating with dynamics that mean that by the time a strategy reaches the communication team, it's not necessarily generally understood even at the top or the next tier down.

(09:09):
 So one of the most important things that impact them is psychological, social, and political risks that impact how people respond in that room. So fear is one of the most consistent findings that we found. And one of the CEOs that we spoke with, he said, "There isn't always a safe way to say what you think about the strategy if you think it's wrong or to admit that you haven't fully understood it." So people will then nod. They leave the room, they carry these private reservations about it rather than offering that honest input. So there might not be that psychological safety in the room. The expectations of how they should behave impact how they actually do. And it also is their ego. So fear and ego are two sides of the same coin. And when you have a look at that, if there's ego in that room, alignment can't coexist with it.

(10:14):
 You have to be able to shed that ego to a degree. And so one demands dominance whilst alignment is about coherence and about connection and genuinely trying to understand other people and their perspectives. It's not necessarily being in agreement with every perspective. It's coming to a shared understanding or shared meaning of what the strategic context is and agreeing on what the actions are going to be that you take away from that. Because often you'll find people leaving the room, thinking they're in agreement, thinking they're aligned, and they go off and do different things

(10:58):
Because they've interpreted differently. So you might have the CFO interpreting it one way, the chief communication officer interpreting it another way, the chief HR officer interpreting it another way, and they're genuinely thinking they're aligned and they're doing the right thing, but they've interpreted it in different ways. So the actions diverge, which is a problem. So there's that psychological safety issue. And when surfacing doubt and challenging a direction carries that professional risk, so people then perform the appearance of commitment rather than genuinely giving it. One of the people we interviewed, Katie McCorley, talks about, she's got this term, she calls it glass head syndrome. It's when leaders are immersed in a strategy for months and months and months, and they've helped shape it. They fall into this assumption that their thinking is actually visible to others. And if there's silence in that team that's misunderstood as understanding, and then once they release it, they think other people are already coming along with them because they understand, because they've understood it so well, and they think other people have understood it.

(12:18):
So they launched the strategy and then they move on. One of our other interviewees who works in the change and transformation space and works with lots of organisations globally, he basically said, strategy, with strategy leaders lose interest after the first 90 days of once it's launched. Just about the sort of time that employees are starting to get their heads around it, they move on. They move on to something else, which is a problem. Oh,

Doug Downs (12:47):
Interesting. And this doesn't just get solved by having a senior comms leader at the table. That's just another leader at the table with the same symptoms and often the same issues. Right.

Zora Artis (13:00):
Yeah. I mean, that alignment paradox, that one of the key findings was the alignment paradox, which is when we all say a strategic alignment is really important to organisational success, but it's poorly understood. It's not well practised and it's hard to sustain. And because that comes down to the fact that leaders at all levels, not just at the top, at all levels going through to people leaders, need to understand how to make alignment a practice, how to make it part of just what they do every day. And that comes down to how they communicate, how they listen, how they create the space for people to be able to share their perspectives without feeling like they're threatened and so that they're genuinely heard.

Doug Downs (13:55):
And I know this is the tip of the iceberg for us in this conversation. Zora, you're in Toronto for IEBC World Conference in mid June.

(14:03):
You're talking to this great research that you and Wayne have done, and there are a lot of different threads that you're going to help us pull on at the conference when you give your presentation. The role AI is playing in accelerating misalignment, how boards should be demanding accountability for specific shifts. Your research identifies for closing the gap and what comms pros can do with practicality on a Monday morning, presenting the full findings at the conference. What should people expect from that session and what are the conversations that you're most looking forward to having in that room in Toronto?

Zora Artis (14:42):
I'm making sure that the session is an interactive session, so it's not just me presenting findings and talking at them. It's going to be a genuine conversation in the room. And one of the participants from the research is actually going to be the room host there on the day, which is going to be fantastic having him involved. But basically, I will share the main key findings, and I'm genuinely going to talk about what it is that leaders are missing. What are they doing wrong? And where's the opportunity live for comms professionals? And I want to understand more about how are they seeing it. Wayne and I, for example, did a webinar recently and we asked, there were communication and HR professionals and chiefs of staff in this webinar. It was a global webinar. And the first question we asked was, "Do you think your executive team is aligned?" 54% said, "No," straight off the bat.

(15:49):
And that's huge. Wow,

Doug Downs (15:51):
More than half.

Zora Artis (15:52):
So that means they see it. So communication professionals and HR professionals, but communication professionals have this amazing role where you can see across an organisation, you can see where messages aren't landing, you can see where the behaviour is deviating from what it should from a cultural perspective. You can see where the decisions aren't supporting what the strategy is saying, where the resourcing's going, what people are talking about, how is that being fed back? What can comms people do to actually elevate strategic alignment in the organisation? And in doing so, elevate the function and the value that they bring to the organisation. So we don't continue talking about we're undervalued, it's a way of demonstrating how to do it. So the conversation will be around that and people bringing their real experience into the room and actually looking at that and talking through that so we can actually genuinely help them in that space.

Wayne Aspland (17:02):
Doug, you mentioned their AI. And if you don't mind, I'll add a comment about this and kind of put a bit of a downer into the discussion. Good.

Doug Downs (17:15):
I was hoping you would.

Wayne Aspland (17:18):
So AI is really important to me. In fact, the two things that underpin what I do today are really alignment in AI. And the reason for that is that I believe the most important capability any organisation needs to have today is agility and both AI capability and alignment help to drive agility in organisations. Now, there's this really fascinating relationship between AI and alignment. On the one hand, AI compromises alignment because what it does is it increases the pace of change, it increases the level of uncertainty because the technology's moving all over the place all the time. It increases the stress on people and on the organisation. And the other thing it does is that, and potentially this will get worse, is it leads to the democratisation of different activities. The obvious example here for a comms audience is creating content. All of a sudden you've got people all over the organisation creating their own content, which actually drives silos.

(18:25):
It reduces alignment. So AI compromises alignment in many different ways, but AI also helps us to enable alignment. And this is the really important bit that its ability to allow us to analyse data and segment audiences and those types of activities far beyond what we've been able to do in the past is incredible. The ability to build personalised training content and other content, the ability to monitor issues before they blow up, if we can become highly AI literate, it will significantly help our ability to drive alignment.

Doug Downs (19:12):
I love that the biggest alignment in the report is that comms pros said, yes, there's misalignment, 54%.

Emily Page (19:19):
Yes.

Zora Artis (19:20):
They see it. They see it. They know it's there, but they continue doing other things. And then there's the question, oh, we're not valued. Why aren't we seen as strategic because you're not behaving that way?

Doug Downs (19:33):
It feels like chicken and the egg, doesn't it?

Zora Artis (19:35):
Yeah. And what we're doing here with this report, although this report is written for CEOs and C suite, is that the opportunity is right here. It's here now and grab it. You can't do it on your own. It's not just for comms. You need to have a coalition with HR, chiefs of staff, et cetera, to actually make this happen.

Doug Downs (20:02):
Brilliant. Well, if you can make it to Toronto for, I think it's June 14, 15, 16, 2026. If you're listening before then, make it to Toronto. For Zora's workshop, three quarters of an hour, it's worth it. I'm going to be there as well. If you're listening after the conference, go to the show notes, download the research paper and the infographics. So great stuff. Thank you, Wayne. Thank you, Zora. Really appreciate your time today.

Zora Artis (20:29):
Thank you, Doug.

Wayne Aspland (20:30):
That's great. Thanks, Doug. Great conversation.

Doug Downs (20:35):
Here are the top three things we got today from Zora Artis and Wayne Aspland. Number one, the nod illusion. Leaders assume silence and agreement means shared understanding, but people leave rooms with different interpretations. Number two, fear kills honesty. Psychological safety is missing so people perform commitment rather than expressing real doubts or confusion. And number three, glass head syndrome. Leaders who built the strategy assume others see what they see and move on just as employees are starting to grasp it. If you'd like to send a message to our guests, Zora Artis, Wayne Aspland, we've got the contact information in the show notes. Definitely check out the IABC World Conference and check out the full study that Zora and Wayne have done. Stories and Strategies is produced by Stories and Strategies podcasts. If you like this episode, please leave a rating and possibly a review if you could.

(21:31):
Thank you to producers, Emily Page and Jocelyn Floralde. Lastly, do us a favour, forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.