If you’re sitting in the middle of a large organisation (not at the top, not at the ground level, but somewhere in between), there's a particular kind of disorientation that comes with it… It’s realising that the people above you are also figuring things out. Not secretly. Not incompetently. Just at their own pace, with their own incomplete picture, working toward a version of clarity that hasn't always fully arrived yet.
I used to think misalignment happens because someone above wasn't communicating well enough, or because a strategy hadn't been articulated clearly enough for the layers below it to act on. Sometimes that is true.
But more often, I've come to think it happens because every layer of an organisation is simultaneously in the midst of figuring things out:
- Leadership is working out what they actually need.
- Middle layers are working out how to operationalise something that hasn't been fully defined.
- Ground-level teams are working out how to act on guidance that keeps shifting.
None of this is dysfunction, exactly. It's just what organisations look like from the inside, at close range.
The tricky part is that these timelines never quite sync up. By the time clarity emerges at one level, the conditions at another have already moved. You can build a carefully and well-reasoned framework / a process / way of evaluating work etc, and find that other parts of the organisation that you thought you understood, had quietly developed differently on their own.
The gap is naturally occurring, not because people are acting in bad faith. But because there is almost always a lag between different layers of management thinking, based what they can see, arriving at different conclusions, at different speeds.
If you’re sitting in the middle layers, that can be challenging because waiting for full alignment before acting means never acting. And ignoring the misalignment means you’ll eventually run into it at the worst possible moment.
To keep things moving forward, what I’ve found more useful is something closer to continuous orientation. Not a one-time alignment check, but a regular habit of asking: has anything shifted upward? Downward? Sideways? Not anxiously, but attentively and mindfully. Like how you'd adjust your footing on terrain that's slightly uneven rather than flat.
The three directions matter roughly equally (even though the upward one tends to get the most attention):
| Direction | Why |
|---|---|
| ↔️ Checking sideways: (Are peers and adjacent teams are navigating the same pressures or different ones?) | Usually surfaces the most useful early signals. |
| ⬇️ Checking downward: (Is what you're building is still serving the people it was meant to serve?) | Keeps the work from drifting into something technically coherent but practically disconnected. |
| ⬆️ Checking upward: (Is this what your bosses need / evaluating you on?) | Self-explanatory, but it's rarely enough on its own. People above you are also mid-thought, and the picture they're forming may not be legible from where you're sitting until it's already arrived. |
The honest conclusion isn't reassuring, but I've found it more useful than pretending otherwise: the alignment problem is a problem that will never get solved. But is something to be continuously managed by people willing to keep looking in all three directions at once. And to hold the ambiguity of never quite knowing if they're fully oriented, while still moving forward anyway.