In a quiet workshop, a team had come together with good intentions. Each person carried a different perspective, a different way of seeing the world. Slowly, those perspectives were woven into a single plan and a single voice.

The result was neat and coherent. The team became a picture of unity. Opinions were weighed, actions coordinated, words measured. Together, they were formidable. Like a bundle of sticks bound tight, no outside force could easily break them.

For a while, it felt perfect. Decisions flowed, actions aligned and mistakes were rare. Strength, it seemed, had found its home in unity.

Then the market shifted.

What had once felt decisive now felt rigid. Decisions would not bend and the small sparks of insight that might have adapted the plan were quieted. The team wanted to move and adapt, but the bundle held firm. The very cohesion that had made them strong now made them brittle.

Team alignment is powerful, but it becomes dangerous when it is mistaken for flexibility. Strength without flexibility is not strength at all. It is a trap. Individual perspectives are muted because the culture rewards cohesion. And in moments that demand adaptation, the bundle cannot move without breaking.

The dark side of alignment

Alignment has become one of the most celebrated ideas in modern organisational life. Shared purpose. Shared values. Shared language. For leaders navigating complexity, it promises relief. When people move in the same direction, coordination improves, friction reduces, and decisions appear easier to make.

Psychologically, alignment lowers cognitive load. It replaces constant deliberation with shared assumptions. People no longer need to negotiate every choice from first principles; the culture does some of the thinking for them.

Where alignment begins to trouble teams is not in what it enables, but in what it quietly constrains.

As values harden into expectations, and expectations into norms, something subtle shifts. Agreement stops being a by-product of collaboration and becomes a signal of belonging. To disagree is no longer just offering a different view. Instead, it risks appearing misaligned.

Importantly, this shift rarely requires enforcement. Few leaders ever say, “Don’t challenge this.” Instead, teams learn through small social cues which subtly indicate which ideas are explored, which are redirected, and which are met with silence. Over time, people adapt. They speak in ways that travel safely and they keep other thoughts to themselves.

What emerges looks like commitment and, often, feels like harmony. But psychologically, it is conformity – though not because people think the same, but because thinking differently has become socially expensive. The hidden cost of alignment is that it raises the price of dissent.

When alignment becomes social control

Once dissent becomes costly, behaviour changes long before beliefs do.

In highly aligned teams, people rarely stop disagreeing altogether. Instead, they become more selective in offering ideas that feel adjacent rather than disruptive. They frame concerns as questions and soften challenges until they barely resemble challenge at all. This ‘friendly friction’ is important for ideation, innovation and combating groupthink.

Psychologically, humans are sensitive to social risk. Long before formal consequences appear, we detect the subtle signals of approval and disapproval that tell us whether we still belong. These cues are enough to shape behaviour without a single rule being written down.

This cultural influence slowly moves the group’s alignment away from coordinating action and towards regulating expression.

We’ve all felt it. That feeling of being in a group situation where something is said or someone has behaved in a way that we know to be unacceptable, but we’ve tolerated it. We’ve not spoken up or challenged at the time – though we might have discussed it post-event.

We might look to values for guidance. Phrases like “That’s not very us,” or “It doesn’t align with our values,” sound principled. Yet values often function as conversation stoppers, rather than guides. They can become unintentionally weaponised, as they mark the boundary of acceptable thought without requiring explanation.

The result is a peculiar kind of silence of self-editing. People are present, committed, and aligned, yet crucial information never makes it into the room. This is the paradox of strong cultures. The clearer the shared meaning, the less space there is to test it.

Preserving alignment without losing flexibility

The answer is not to abandon alignment completely. Healthy teams make a quiet but critical distinction: they align on direction, but not on interpretation.

The vision sets a vector – a north star – and offers a reason to move together, without dictating how each person must see the traverse the terrain. This shift sounds subtle, but psychologically it is profound.

When values are treated as questions rather than commandments, they invite contribution. Instead of asking, “Is this aligned?” teams ask, “How does this serve what we’re trying to achieve?” Disagreement ceases to be a threat to belonging. Instead, it becomes a way of protecting the purpose itself and allowing each individual to ask, “What can I contribute towards that north star?”

More crucially, this requires making dissent safe before it becomes necessary.

Teams that adapt well don’t wait for friction to appear. They normalise it early, while stakes are low, encouraging challenge to be expected, rather than the exception. In these environments, speaking up doesn’t carry a social penalty, which is the essence of psychological safety.

Psychological safety isn’t comfort (although it is often mistaken for this). It’s not about being passive or nice. It’s the permission to disrupt and to not be ridiculed or reprimanded for that disruption. It’s when speaking up doesn’t carry a social risk.

Leaders play a disproportionate role here. What matters is not what leaders say about challenge, but what they do in the moments when challenge arrives. Is it explored? Defended against? Reframed? Ignored?

As individuals, we’re highly tuned to these cues and teams learn quickly which version is real – regardless of what we might say out loud.

Flexible alignment also demands clarity about what must remain fixed and what must remain fluid. The expectations and clarity of our non-negotiables must be paramount and explicit. By having these as open, clear guides, it allows our strategies, interpretations, and contributions to be open to revision.

This provides both flexibility and resiliency, by establishing what is sacred (the vision and behaviours) and what is more supple (individuals’ contributions towards the goal). In these resilient cultures, alignment is not something people prove through agreement. It is something they demonstrate through engaged disagreement in service of a shared aim.

From bundles to constellations

There is another way to think about alignment: as a constellation.

In a constellation, the stars do not merge or surrender their individuality. Each remains distinct, separated by vast distance, yet oriented around a shared pattern that gives meaning to their position.

In systems like this, leadership is not a role that sits permanently at the centre. It moves. It emerges. It is taken up by whoever has the clearest view in that moment, closest to the terrain, the risk, or the opportunity. Authority is temporary and contextual, not defended or hoarded.

This distinction is explored more deeply in Constellation: Leadership reimagined for a connected age, which examines cultures built around shared purpose rather than positional power. In these environments, alignment provides orientation rather than control. When teams share a north star but remain free in their approach, disagreement becomes information, and leadership becomes an act rather than a title.

In a constellation, the strongest teams are not those bound most tightly together. They are those that know when to hold, when to loosen, and when to let someone else step forward.

The bundle holds – but it bends.

References:

Carson, J. B., Tesluk, P. E., & Marrone, J. A. (2007). Shared leadership in teams: An investigation of antecedent conditions and performance. Academy of Management Journal, 50(5), 1217–1234.

Edmondson, A. (2019). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley.

Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Wareham, D. (2025). Constellation: Leadership reimagined for a connected age. Firgun Publishing.