A landmark article in the forthcoming July–August 2026 issue of Harvard Business Review identifies one of the most persistent and costly failures in modern business: the false alignment trap.
Julia Dhar, Kristy R. Ellmer, and Philip Jameson of Boston Consulting Group — drawing on research across nearly 2,000 companies and their forthcoming book How Change Really Works: Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization (Harvard Business Review Press, 2026) — argue compellingly that most organisational transformations fail not through poor execution but because senior leaders believe they are aligned when they fundamentally are not. They are not aligned on why change is needed, what precisely needs to change, or how change will actually happen.
It is a rigorous and important piece of work. And it surfaces something I have been confronting in boardrooms and executive teams around the world for over two decades — something that extends far beyond change programmes into the specific, high-stakes challenge of building a genuine culture for innovation-led growth.
Because here is the uncomfortable truth: the false alignment trap does not just apply to transformation efforts broadly. It is rampant — and arguably even more damaging — in the specific context of innovation leadership and culture. And until organisations recognise this, the innovation gap will persist regardless of how many programmes, labs, or transformation initiatives they launch.
The Research That Should Make Every Executive Uncomfortable
Dhar, Ellmer, and Jameson document how executive teams routinely fall into what they term “false alignment” — a state in which leaders behave as if they agree when they actually do not. They distinguish this from true agreement, which requires leaders to achieve detailed and explicit shared understanding on three questions: Why are we changing? What are we changing? How will the changes occur?
Their research into nearly 2,000 public companies found that more than 70% fail to outperform their industry peer-group average in both the short and long term following a performance downturn. They trace a significant portion of this failure to dysfunction at the top — specifically, to the gap between what leaders say they have agreed and what they have actually, specifically, rigorously agreed.
The case they present is striking. In one exercise with an executive team, when asked to write down the specific ways in which their organisation would be different after transformation, leaders gave wildly diverging answers — ranging from operational continuity to structural reinvention. Each had assumed the others understood what they meant. None had tested whether they actually did.
“Alignment and agreement are not the same,” Dhar, Ellmer, and Jameson write. “When company leaders say, ‘We are aligned,’ what they usually mean is, ‘We are not in one another’s way.'”
That distinction — between not obstructing each other and genuinely, specifically agreeing — is one of the most important observations in recent management literature. And it maps almost precisely onto the failure mode I encounter most frequently when working with organisations on innovation strategy, leadership, and culture.
The Innovation-Specific False Alignment Trap
Across two decades of working with Fortune 500 companies and governments worldwide, I have observed a persistent and crippling pattern: senior leaders who are genuinely aligned — in the HBR sense, meaning not in each other’s way — around innovation as a declared strategic priority, but who have never genuinely agreed on what that means, what it requires, or how capability will actually be built.
My own research consistently reflects the scale of this problem. While over 80% of executives identify innovation as critical to their growth strategy, less than 10% express satisfaction with their innovation capability. That is not a coincidence or an execution problem. It is the direct consequence of a specific form of false alignment — one that is even harder to expose than the kind Dhar, Ellmer, and Jameson describe, because it hides beneath the language of strategic ambition.
Ask any executive team whether innovation is important. Every hand goes up. Ask them whether they are aligned on innovation as a priority. Every head nods. Ask them to write down — separately, without conferring — what their organisation’s innovation capability needs to look like, what it will produce, how it will be built, what leadership behaviours it requires, and what they personally are willing to change about how they lead to make it possible.
What follows is almost always the same: divergence. Significant, revealing, transformational divergence.
One leader describes innovation as incremental product improvement. Another believes it means digital transformation. A third assumes it will be delivered by a newly hired Chief Innovation Officer. A fourth thinks it is primarily about AI. A fifth declares it’s purely about culture. None of them have agreed on any of the questions that actually matter.
Innovation capability is not declared into existence. It is built through the deliberate, sustained alignment of strategy, leadership behaviour, organisational systems, and culture. And that kind of alignment requires exactly the level of rigorous, specific, uncomfortable agreement that Dhar, Ellmer, and Jameson argue most executive teams never achieve.
Why Innovation False Alignment Is Harder to Expose
The HBR article identifies three common causes of false alignment in change programmes: leaders not realising they disagree, leaders pretending to agree, and leaders deferring disagreement under time pressure. All three operate in the innovation context — but they are complicated by a fourth dynamic that is unique to innovation: the deep ambiguity of what innovation actually means.
Change programmes, however complex, typically have a definable endpoint. Innovation capability is ongoing, systemic, and behavioural. It is not a project with a completion date. It requires leaders to sustain alignment not around a programme but around a philosophy of leadership — around the consistent modelling of behaviours that many leaders find genuinely uncomfortable, including calculated risk-taking, tolerance for productive failure, and the willingness to challenge the very governance systems that give them their authority.
This makes false alignment far easier to sustain and far harder to surface. Because when you ask whether leaders are aligned on the priority of innovation, they are. It is when you ask whether they are aligned on what that priority actually requires of them — personally, behaviourally, structurally — that the divergence becomes visible.
The false consensus effect that the HBR authors cite — the psychological tendency to overestimate how much others share our views — is particularly powerful in innovation contexts. Because innovation is aspirational by nature, leaders project their own assumptions onto it. Each one imagines that when they said “we’re committed to building a culture of innovation,” the person sitting next to them understood the same thing. They almost never did.
The Three Questions Innovation Leaders Must Actually Answer
Drawing on the HBR framework and my own work with organisations around the world, I would argue that the three questions Dhar, Ellmer, and Jameson identify for change programmes translate directly — and even more critically — into the innovation context.
The first question is: Why are we building innovation capability? Not “because we need to innovate,” which is not an answer — it is a platitude. The answer must be specific. What is the strategic problem that genuine innovation capability will solve? What does the organisation stand to lose if it does not build this capability? What customer, market, or operational pain is innovation specifically designed to address? Without this clarity, executive teams will continue to talk past each other in strategy sessions and wonder why nothing changes.
The second question is: What are we actually changing — and what are we not? This is where most organisations falter completely. Building the right culture for innovation is not primarily about innovation programmes, labs, or workshops. It is about changing leadership behaviours. It is about redesigning systems — performance metrics, resource allocation, governance, recognition — so that they enable rather than systematically undermine innovation. It requires an honest audit of what currently exists and an explicit decision about what will be different. Without this specificity, organisations invest in activity that looks like its innovation focussed — what has long been described as “innovation theatre” — while the underlying conditions remain unchanged.
The third question is: How will this happen, and who is responsible for what? This is where the distinction between ownership and delegation becomes critical. In my work with executive teams, I emphasise that building innovation capability requires executives to genuinely ‘own’ the innovation agenda — not sponsor it, not champion it rhetorically, but actively shape the conditions, behaviours, and systems that enable it. This is not something that can be delegated to a Chief Innovation Officer, an HR programme, or a team of consultants. The leadership behaviours that build innovation capability must be modelled at the top, driven operationally through the management layer, and enabled across the entire organisation.
Until these three questions receive specific, explicit, rigorous answers — and until the entire senior team genuinely, not nominally, agrees on those answers — every investment in innovation culture will produce impressive activity metrics and disappointing outcomes.
The Innovation Double Bind: When Leaders Demand What They Won’t Demonstrate
One of the most revealing passages in the HBR article describes what happens when false alignment is allowed to persist through change execution. They identify three failure modes: paralysis, where teams are caught between competing leadership visions and make no meaningful progress; hyperactivity, where teams run at multiple contradictory priorities simultaneously; and tunnel vision, where teams execute a narrow interpretation of the strategy that misses its broader intent.
In innovation contexts, these failure modes have a distinctive character — because they are compounded by what I call the innovation culture double bind. Organisations that have not achieved true alignment on what innovation requires create an environment in which the leadership team simultaneously demands innovation and systematically destroys the conditions that make it possible.
Executives demand breakthrough thinking while maintaining governance systems that penalise unsuccessful experiments. They declare psychological safety as a priority while conducting quarterly performance reviews focused exclusively on short-term metrics. They announce innovation as a strategic pillar while conducting efficiency reviews that eliminate precisely the organisational slack that experimentation requires.
The neuroscience here is unambiguous. Our brains experience potential losses approximately twice as intensely as equivalent gains — a well-documented phenomenon with profound implications for innovation. When organisations layer inconsistency onto this reality, asking people to take risks in environments that signal those risks will be punished, they are not simply failing to build innovation capability. They are actively reinforcing the psychological barriers to it.
Research consistently shows that 60% of employees have actively withheld innovative ideas due to fear of negative consequences. This is not a motivation problem. It is the predictable result of false alignment at the top — leaders who have agreed that innovation is important, without ever agreeing on what they are willing to sacrifice to make it possible.
Reaching True Innovation Alignment
The HBR framework for overcoming false alignment — setting clear parameters, provoking early exchange, conducting quality debate, reaching formal verdicts, and sending unified messages — is directly applicable to the innovation leadership context. But it requires an additional layer of rigour, because innovation alignment is not a one-time decision. It must be sustained through ongoing leadership behaviours.
From my advisory work with executive teams around the world, the organisations that successfully build genuine innovation capability share a common characteristic: their senior leadership teams have done the difficult work of achieving true agreement — not on whether innovation is important, but on the specific, uncomfortable implications of what innovation requires.
That means explicitly agreeing on what kind of innovation the organisation is pursuing — and being precise enough that every member of the executive team could articulate it consistently to their teams. It means agreeing on what governance changes, resource commitments, and structural shifts are required to support it. It means agreeing on which leadership behaviours must change — and holding each other accountable when they do not. And critically, it means agreeing on the role of every organisational layer in building this capability: ensuring that executives genuinely own the agenda, that managers are properly enabled to drive it, and that frontline employees are given the conditions to contribute to it.
This is not easy work. The HBR authors note that true agreement requires a willingness to have uncomfortable conversations and hold red lines. For innovation, those conversations are particularly confrontational — because they require leaders to acknowledge the gap between what they claim to value and what their behaviours and systems actually enable.
But for organisations willing to undertake this work, the rewards are transformational. Companies that embed genuine innovation capability consistently outperform industry peers and achieve significantly greater long-term shareholder value. The capability itself becomes a source of sustainable competitive advantage — one that cannot be easily copied, because it is built into the DNA of how the organisation leads, rather than the tools and programmes it deploys.
The Question Every Board Should Be Asking
Dhar, Ellmer, and Jameson conclude their article with a powerful observation: that there is often more time than leaders think to achieve true agreement, even under pressure — and that programmes launched without genuine alignment consistently require far more time and energy during execution than the upfront debate would ever have cost.
The same is true — more so — for innovation capability. The organisations I encounter that have spent years and millions on innovation programmes without meaningful results have invariably done so without first achieving true alignment at the top. They agreed that innovation mattered. They never agreed on what making it possible would actually require.
The question for every board and every executive team is not whether you are aligned on innovation as a priority. It is whether you have ever had the specific, uncomfortable, explicit conversation that true alignment on innovation capability requires — and whether every member of your senior team could write down, right now, consistent answers to the three questions that actually matter.
If the answer to that question is uncertain, you have not yet escaped the innovation alignment trap. And no programme, lab, or cultural initiative will help you do so until you do.
This article draws on Cris Beswick’s experience advising Fortune 500 companies and governments worldwide on innovation strategy, leadership, and culture, and references “The False Alignment Trap” by Julia Dhar, Kristy R. Ellmer, and Philip Jameson, Harvard Business Review, July–August 2026 issue (forthcoming), and their book How Change Really Works: Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization (Harvard Business Review Press, 2026).
Cris Beswick is a strategic advisor and globally recognised thought leader on innovation strategy, leadership, and culture. He works with executive teams at Fortune 500 companies and governments worldwide to build innovation-led organisations capable of shaping the future. He is co-author of the bestselling management book Building a Culture of Innovation.