The Alignment Meeting

“Let’s get aligned.”

Alignment meetings are where eight people spend an hour discovering they still disagree, and then schedule another alignment meeting.

Nobody leaves an alignment meeting aligned. They leave with action items, which are things people write down to avoid making a decision in the room. The action items generate more meetings. The meetings generate more action items.

Alignment is the corporate word for “we can’t decide and we’re going to distribute the cost of that indecision across everyone’s calendar until someone either decides or leaves.”