Hidden Arrows in Organisational Change: Why Alignment Alone Doesn't Keep Explanations Current

Shared direction shaped by influences still coming into view.

Alignment is widely recognised as one of the conditions that allows collective action to begin. It creates enough shared understanding for people to move in the same direction. Decisions become clearer, priorities become easier to coordinate and work gathers momentum because people are acting from a sufficiently similar interpretation of the situation.

That similarity does not require everyone to hold exactly the same explanation. Different experiences, responsibilities and vantage points naturally produce different interpretations. Alignment reflects the point at which those interpretations become compatible enough for coordinated action to proceed.

When Explanations Settle

As that happens, the conversation changes.      

It begins with an effort to understand what is happening. It gradually settles around an explanation of why it is happening. From there, attention moves towards deciding what should be done and, once implementation begins, towards whether the chosen direction is progressing.

The explanation remains present.

It simply stops being the centre of attention.

This follows a perfectly sensible business logic. Once a shared explanation has created enough coherence for action, energy is invested in implementation. Plans take shape around the chosen direction. Communication reinforces it. Measures support it. Managers carry it into everyday decisions. The explanation that created movement becomes embedded within the movement itself.

This is a structural consequence of coordinated action.

The paradox is that the better alignment succeeds in creating shared direction, the less naturally attention returns to the explanation that created that direction.

Reality, however, does not pause while implementation catches up.

Local conditions evolve. Priorities shift. People interpret the same decision through different responsibilities. Informal practices influence formal decisions. New constraints emerge. Existing ones become more visible.

The explanation that helped the work begin can therefore become progressively less complete while continuing to feel entirely convincing.

The Hidden Arrows

Visible issues rarely exist on their own. They sit within a wider pattern of influences shaping both what people do and the results that later become visible. In causal reasoning, these influences are called confounders. In everyday organisational life it may be easier to think of them as hidden arrows.

They are hidden because the original explanation did not require them.

A clearer meeting structure may improve discussion while authority continues to influence whether decisions travel into practice. Stronger communication may increase visibility while trust continues to shape how messages are understood. Greater accountability may strengthen follow-through while competing priorities continue to determine where attention ultimately settles.

None of these observations is incorrect.

The hidden arrows change the meaning of what those observations are telling us.

When the Explanation Becomes Too Small

Collective decisions emerge from explanations of reality rather than from reality in an unfiltered form. The quality of collective decisions therefore depends on the quality of the causal explanations that leaders and teams construct.

Those explanations make coordinated action possible.

Yet they remain provisional.

The work itself continues changing the conditions from which those explanations first emerged. Every intervention enters an evolving system. Over time it begins influencing that system as well.

Which influences were present from the beginning, and which have emerged through the response itself?

When an initiative continues producing value while the pattern around it changes, has the intervention become less useful, or has the explanation simply reached the limit of what it can account for?

Imagine an initiative intended to strengthen managerial accountability. Expectations become clearer. Performance conversations become more consistent. Managers follow through more reliably. The intervention succeeds in improving important aspects of the work.

Yet the results remain uneven.

Some teams continue to progress while others struggle despite applying the same practices.

The immediate temptation is to look more closely at accountability itself.

Calibration asks a different question.

What is accountability now interacting with?

The answer may include changing priorities, limited decision authority, competing demands or uncertainty about which objectives matter most. Accountability still contributes. The intervention still creates value. The explanation, however, has become too small for the reality now unfolding.

At that point, further effort often gathers around the response already in place. Performance conversations become more structured, follow-up becomes more frequent and additional reporting or oversight is introduced. Each adjustment may improve part of the work. Taken together, they may also indicate that increasing organisational attention is being invested in sustaining a causal account that no longer fully explains the pattern.

The original account can still support the work.

It does not need replacing.

It needs extending.

Keeping the Explanation Alive

Reflection becomes valuable precisely here.

Its role is less about looking back than about improving the explanation while the work continues moving forward. It revisits the causal story underneath the activity. It asks what the intervention is now interacting with, which assumptions continue to account for what is becoming visible, which hidden arrows are beginning to influence the picture and whether the explanation itself has become ready for another iteration.

This is calibration.

Calibration is not continual reconsideration. Constantly reopening explanations would weaken the stability that coordinated action depends upon. Equally, leaving every explanation untouched allows yesterday's understanding to shape tomorrow's decisions long after reality has moved on.

Its discipline lies in recognising the difference between ordinary implementation friction and evidence that the causal story itself has begun to change.

Alignment and calibration therefore perform different but complementary functions.

Alignment creates the coherence from which coordinated action becomes possible.

Calibration protects the quality of the explanation that gives that coherence direction.

Neither replaces the other.

One creates movement.

The other helps ensure that movement remains connected to the reality through which it is travelling.

The Next Explanation

That raises one final organisational question.

If alignment naturally concentrates attention on execution, where does the explanation itself remain open to examination?

There is no single answer.

Some create that space through cross-functional reflection. Others through governance, peer challenge, independent review or external facilitation.

The location matters less than the function.

A position that is not carrying the alignment can hold the calibration.

It allows coordinated action to continue while the explanation itself remains open to development. It creates enough distance to notice when hidden arrows have become influential, when apparently separate signals belong to the same emerging pattern, and when a useful explanation has become ready to grow rather than to be discarded.

Perhaps this is the deeper role of reflection.

It does not interrupt alignment.

It helps alignment remain intelligent.

And perhaps that leaves one final question.

When the chosen direction still appears to be working, what would tell us that the explanation behind it has quietly become too small for the reality it is now trying to describe?

Where This Conversation Continues

The questions explored in this article are not confined to a single leadership challenge. They can become part of leadership mentoring, performance management, facilitation, psychological safety, inclusive thinking or broader organisational development. Each provides a different context for strengthening judgement and revisiting explanations as reality evolves. Explore our Leadership Development practice areas to see how these different contexts connect.