What is it about?
Perceived organizational alignment and actual alignment are different things. Structural and cognitive mechanisms create an Alignment Illusion, where leaders perceive meaningful alignment, but material misalignment exists. Traditional approaches focus within the domains of strategy, execution, or culture separately, not the relationships between them. Drawing on executive interviews, we introduce the Organizational Gap Framework (OGF), a relational theory of misalignment that maps three gap types: Strategy-Execution, Execution-Culture, and Culture-Strategy where misalignment quietly accumulates and produces spillover effects in adjacent domains. The OGF gives leaders a structured way to break through the illusion, diagnose which gap is driving underperformance, and act accordingly.
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Why is it important?
Leaders often assess misalignment informally. The OGF Framework gives leaders a way to diagnose misalignment in their organizations.
Perspectives
This framework was developed from a real frustration with the informal nature of how alignment is assessed in most organizations. I developed this as a way to help leaders process and diagnose misalignment in a structured way, providing a shared language for naming some of the challenges that have been felt, if not yet named.
Dr. Brian Wiersma
Liberty University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The alignment illusion: a relational theory of misalignment and the gaps that form in organizations, Planning Review, September 2026, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/sl-07-2026-0325.
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