Why Organizational Alignment Matters

A new hire looks at the org chart to find out who owns a decision, then spends the next hour getting passed between three people who each believe someone else owns it.

A strategic plan names innovation as the top priority, but every project that reaches a leadership review gets scored on cost savings alone.

Two departments read the same process document and walk away doing two different things, each certain their version is the official one.

None of this means anyone is incompetent. It means the official version of how things work (the map), and what people do day to day (the territory), have drifted apart. A lot of people might say your organization has a communication problem, and they might be half right. But internal communication issues are just a larger part of organizational alignment, or in our case organizational misalignment. When the map doesn’t match the territory it can effect your culture, your retention rate, your program delivery effectiveness, and even your bottom line.

Alfred Korzybski coined the phrase “the map is not the territory” in 1931, and the clearest way I have found to explain it is with a story about Chicago. A city planner can hand you a beautifully detailed map, every street and rail line accounted for. But say you are standing in the Loop looking for a building that was torn down years ago (like I was a few weeks ago), an old map would send you somewhere that no longer exists. The map wasn’t the problem, it was designed exactly for the time and place it was made. But an out-of-date map can cost you more time than having no map at all.

Organizations run on maps too: org charts, strategic plans, process documents, job descriptions, SOPs, all the things that tell the official story of how the place works. The territory is what people are really doing at work. Every shortcut, workaround, wizened soft power holder the team goes to for decisions they should be asking their manager for are places where the map and territory diverge. When the gap is wide enough you will notice that priorities start showing up to fund or reward practices that don’t tie back to your mission or OKRs.

In fifteen years of operational leadership, I have never walked into an organization where the map and the territory matched perfectly. If I ever do walk into one, that’s my signal to nope out of there because I’m likely in a sci-fi horror Stepford Employee type scenario. It’s just not natural. Some gap is normal. But the organizations that struggle are the ones that see the gaps and double down on fixes that are not adopted by the team, see the gaps but ignore them, or worst of all, never go looking for the gap at all.

[This is the first post in a short series on finding that gap: where it tends to show up, and how to close it. Next up: the three places misalignment hides in plain sight.]