What’s on the market for alignment? Let’s make sense of it.
If you’re trying to improve team effectiveness, engagement or change outcomes, alignment is a crucial part of the puzzle, but knowing where to start is rarely straightforward. With numerous tools on the market claiming to support alignment, this article helps clarify what’s available, what each approach offers, and where to start.
We’re picking up confusion in the market
If every buyer of team effectiveness or organizational development programs had one voice and you asked, “What would you use to improve team alignment?”, the responses would likely be:
“I wouldn’t know.”
“What exactly do you mean by alignment?”
“There’s so much out there – where do we even begin?”
That’s what we heard at the Organization Development Network Europe Conference in Brussels recently. And it reflects a common challenge: alignment is widely recognised as essential, yet it’s rarely well-defined, and there’s no shared language for how to achieve it.
Alignment can mean many things - that’s the challenge
The term alignment is used to describe everything from strategic cohesion to interpersonal understanding. As a result, organizations often reach for familiar ‘solutions’, but these typically address symptoms rather than causes. The effect is often temporary.
Here are five types of interventions typically used in the name of alignment:
Leadership training to reinforce strategic messaging and shared purpose
Internal communication campaigns aimed at engaging employees with strategy
Psychometric tools to build self-awareness and improve collaboration
Team offsites or away-days to reconnect and rebuild trust
Organization redesigns to clarify structure, roles, and workflows.
These all support alignment in their own ways and can be helpful. However, when people lack a common understanding of their shared challenges, priorities, and next actions, the central problem is misaligned perceptions on the real work in progress. And this can undermine everything.
It doesn’t happen by itself anymore
In the years since the pandemic, teams have felt the impact of increased fragmentation and the pressure to perform amid complexity. Misalignment is no longer a background issue. It shows up in decision-making, delivery, trust, and pace.
The conditions contributing to this shift include:
Accelerated change makes it increasingly difficult to keep up, both individually and collectively.
Remote and hybrid work, which limits informal conversations and shared meaning-making
Generational and cultural diversity, which brings valuable differences, but also different interpretations
Workforce turnover, which leads to gaps in context and tacit knowledge
As Professor Jonathan Trevor put it in the Complexity Edition of his Fit for Business podcast:
“Better alignment is a prerequisite for effective change & transformation, engagement, innovation, and performance in today’s complex organizational environments.”
In short, alignment is no longer an interesting side issue; it is a pressing need.
Making sense of the market: what’s out there?
We’ve grouped a selection of better-known approaches into two categories: those that put alignment at the centre, and those that contribute to it indirectly.
Approaches where alignment is a central focus:
The Cynefin Company
Focus: Contextual alignment for decision-making in complexity
Cynefin helps organisations recognise the nature of challenges — clear, complicated, complex, or chaotic — and adapt accordingly. Its QuickSense tool blends narrative data with pattern detection to enable shared sense-making and more aligned action in complex environments.
Mirror Mirror
Focus: Team by team alignment on real work challenges. Mirror Mirror combines a diagnostic, a dialogic process, and facilitator training to help teams discover and deal with key alignment gaps systematically, on a cyclical basis. It is designed to be practical, scalable, and ‘handoverable’ so teams can become more adaptive as they think, act and work better together .
Orgonomics
Focus: Systemic organisational design and operating model alignment
Orgonomics looks at how structures, systems, and processes support or hinder alignment across the organisation. It views misalignment not only as a people issue but as a breakdown in organisational design, and helps redesign for cohesion.
Team Connect 360
Focus: Systemic team coaching built on diagnostic insight
A team assessment tool and program that measures alignment across purpose, roles, norms, and trust. Often used as a starting point for team coaching, it enables a structured approach to strengthening cohesion and effectiveness with teams and their stakeholders.
Cultivating Leadership
Focus: Leadership development for complexity and adaptive alignment
Rooted in adult development theory, Cultivating Leadership equips leaders to work with uncertainty, hold multiple perspectives, and lead through sense-making. Alignment is achieved through dialogue, reflection, and embracing diverse viewpoints, rather than relying on top-down control.
Approaches that address alignment indirectly:
Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Addresses the interpersonal foundations that affect alignment, trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. Misalignment often stems from breakdowns at these levels.
Clear Leadership (Gervase Bushe)
Builds interpersonal clarity by reducing “interpersonal mush.” Helps people recognise and communicate their own experience clearly, enabling more authentic alignment through shared reality.
DISC / Lumina Spark / Insights Discovery
Psychometric tools that enhance individual awareness and team communication. While not focused on alignment directly, they support smoother collaboration and reduce interpersonal friction.
Wageman’s 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness
A research-backed model that defines the essential conditions for teams to succeed. Alignment happens when the right people, structure, goals, and context are in place.
What next?
Getting started is tricky because while you might have a sense of the kind of core alignment issue you’re dealing with, how can you know for sure?
Is the problem about strategic alignment: unclarity on purpose, direction, priorities, or values?
Is it about culture: how people interact, share perspectives, make decisions together, or something else?
Is it about stakeholder collaboration, or coordinated implementation?
And what if there are various alignment problems are dispersed across different parts of the organization?
That’s why starting with clarity is crucial: What kind of alignment are we talking about? Where are the gaps? And what can help close them?
That’s the starting point Mirror Mirror is set up for. Our alignment diagnostic runs team by team so you can pinpoint exactly what’s going on and take it from there.
We work directly with leadership and delivery teams, as well as with in-house practitioners or external agencies and consultancies, as needed.
Let’s talk about you
If your organization is navigating change, finding it difficult to make progress, or struggling to get everyone on the same page, it’s worth asking:
Do we know where we stand, or are we guessing?
Let’s have a conversation about what alignment really means and where to start so you can get everyone moving in the same direction, quickly.