Disconnects: When the signal breaks down

Why Great Ideas Get Lost in Translation

Not all blockers are visible. Sometimes, what slows down change isn’t resistance.

A strategy sounds clear in the boardroom but loses shape as it moves outward. Teams start strong but drift apart. Different parts of the organization work toward different goals, or interpret the same goal in conflicting ways. Alignment slips and coordination is needed.

These are disconnects. And they happen more often than anyone admits.

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” — George Bernard Shaw

In a world of increasing organizational complexity – hybrid work, cross-functional teams, global delivery – these gaps are everywhere. Between teams, between systems, between what’s decided and what’s done. While they rarely make headlines, they quietly drain progress from even the most promising initiatives.

Disconnects aren’t friction. They’re something else.

Where friction is often local and procedural, disconnects are structural. They span functions, incentives, and leadership narratives.

How Disconnects Show Up

Disconnects tend to look ordinary, but they have outsized effects on progress. These are some of the most common signals we see:

䷢ Misaligned OKRs or goals that don’t ladder up

Frameworks like OKRs promise alignment, but they often reveal disconnects instead. When teams write objectives in isolation – or interpret shared ones too differently – effort scatters. One team optimizes for efficiency, another for innovation, and both are technically hitting their marks. Still, the company doesn’t move. A common realization: “We hit all the key results, but we’re still not making progress together.”

🫥 Unclear roles and decision rights

When ownership is vague, decision-making slows. Projects get stuck between teams, or handed off without clarity. People hesitate to act or duplicate efforts. The mood becomes cautious, not collaborative. Someone might quietly reflect, “I thought this was your call — or was it ours?”

🤬 Conflicting incentives

Even well-aligned strategies can fall apart under misaligned KPIs. One team is rewarded for speed, another for minimizing risk. Instead of moving forward together, teams start playing defensively. A common observation: “We’re pulling in opposite directions, but both doing our job.”

📊 Data without shared meaning

Dashboards exist, but they don’t tell the same story to everyone. One team sees a performance win, another sees a compliance red flag. Disagreement over what metrics mean leads to uncertainty or stalled action. You might hear, “We’re looking at the same numbers, but not reading them the same way.”

⩰ Governance without coordination

Sometimes it’s not the absence of structure, but the overlap of too many. Multiple owners, unclear escalation paths, or regionally different requirements create drag. Initiatives stall waiting for a go-ahead no one feels authorized to give. Teams often ask, “Whose approval are we actually waiting for?”

These disconnects show up especially around emerging tech. For example, as AI tools are introduced across teams, governance questions multiply. Who owns the strategy? What does responsible use look like? Which KPIs apply: speed, risk, compliance, value?

When no shared model exists, teams move in different directions. Some race to prototype. Others wait for policy. Innovation slows not because of resistance, but because of conflicting expectations. In many organizations, AI becomes a catalyst that reveals deeper disconnects already at play.

Why Disconnects Matter

Disconnects don’t always stop a project. They let it move, but without direction. Meetings multiply to reconcile competing priorities. Teams build solutions that solve different problems. And once the drift grows large enough, things stall.

Even worse, disconnects erode trust.

People see mixed messages and begin to protect their own turf. Leaders grow skeptical of alignment efforts. Employees disengage quietly. And when the next big initiative comes around, momentum is harder to summon.

That’s not just a delivery issue. It’s a cultural one. Over time, disconnects build fatigue. And fatigue kills change.

How Serious Is the Problem?

• 85% of go-to-market teams report chronic misalignment—even though 85% say they’re confident in their strategy—a contradiction referred to as the “85/85 GTM Alignment Gap” (Mural, Unearth).
• Organizations with poor internal alignment can waste 40–60% of senior leadership time just managing coordination instead of focusing on strategic work (Strategeos).
• HBR research reveals that misaligned execution is the cause behind 70–90% of failed transformations (Harvard Business Review).
• Gallup finds that disengaged employees, often a result of unclear roles and goals, cost organizations about 34% of their annual salary in lost productivity (The Maur Company).
• Misalignment between strategy and culture can lead to 68% lower employee engagement, and globally, poor alignment costs businesses up to $8.9 trillion in lost productivity annually (Unearth).

These numbers show what happens when disconnects go unaddressed. Misalignment isn’t an “operational hiccup”. It’s a systemic drag affecting leadership time, employee engagement and experience, speed, and therefore, revenue.

Governance Model Relevance

In many organizations, disconnects are seen as a failure of governance. The natural reaction: adopt a better system. That’s where frameworks like SAFe, Scrum@Scale, Lean Enterprise, and even Sociocracy come in, promising speed, clarity, and structured coordination across the organization.

And they can deliver on that promise. But adopting these models is a significant undertaking.

They often require deep structural change, long training cycles, and cultural buy-in that isn’t always there. Without a shared understanding of the current state — how people actually work, where decisions get stuck, what’s already misaligned — these frameworks land on shaky ground.

That’s why we treat service and systemic design as the on-ramp to better governance, surfacing how things actually work before committing to structure.

Before asking teams to commit to a new operating model, we use service design and systemic design methods to map what’s real. To visualize how things actually work. To involve the people affected. To test small shifts that move things in the right direction — without betting everything on a framework.

This isn’t a rejection of governance model, but a sequence correction: Design methods can build the shared language and insight that help governance frameworks land. This turns abstract models into something lived and understood.

How Design Helps Reconnect

Systemic Design offers real leverage in tackling disconnects — not just at the workflow level, but at the level of structure, culture, and coordination.

Unlike traditional design tools that focus on user experience or process efficiency, Systemic Design helps organizations see and shape the system behind those experiences. It highlights how decisions are made, how incentives work, how teams relate, and how governance impacts behavior. In other words, it looks at why disconnects happen, and not just where.

Its strength lies in a few key capabilities:

• It engages vertically, from customer-facing practices to executive logic
• It integrates structure, leadership, and narrative, not just a hard process flow
• It invites participation across silos, not just observation from the outside
• It scales through small shifts, rather than relying on full transformation upfront

And while Systemic Design provides the mindset and method, it also leans on more familiar tools to anchor the work.

Service Blueprinting, for example, remains one of the most effective ways to expose disconnects across functions, channels, and ownership lines. A blueprint can make invisible tensions real — showing how a strategy cascades (or doesn’t), how responsibilities overlap, where data goes missing, and why people operate in isolation. It translates complexity into a shared map.

But the blueprint on its own is just another surface. Systemic Design gives it context — tying the visible gaps back to their structural and cultural roots.

Another essential part of the approach is narrative building. Systemic Design doesn’t aim to impress with diagrams, but to co-create a shared story: where we are, what’s holding us back, and what might move us forward. That story, when built together, can do more to realign an organization than any framework or comms strategy.

This also explains why leadership involvement isn’t optional. Systemic Design invites leaders to help shape the map and understand their role in the system. It turns change from something requested to something owned.

And perhaps most importantly: it starts small.

Reconnecting to Accelerate

You don’t need a full transformation program to start reconnecting what’s become misaligned. Given our era of AI and fast political shifts, most organizations are already in one, whether they call it that or not.

Organizations are navigating change and trying to align strategy and operations. Culture is shifting under pressure. The real challenge isn’t starting change — it’s helping it land. When disconnects are present, they rarely fix themselves.

They need attention. And in many cases, they require structural or leadership-level shifts. But tackling them doesn’t have to mean launching a new program, buying into a massive framework, or restructuring the org chart. Disconnects are rarely fixed from the top. Again, we address them with the people affected, not for them.

Often, the simplest path forward is to change how the next thing is done.

Each event, project or initiative is a chance to ask different questions. To adopt a different plan. To map out the system before locking in a plan. To prototype something shared before scaling something siloed.

This is what we mean when we say design is the on-ramp.

It lets you test new ways of working without waiting for permission or rolling out a new model. It builds the behaviors that governance frameworks later rely on.

So you don’t have to start with a revolution. You just have to start deliberately.

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Participate in the discussion:

Change Acceleration Series in LinkedIn

1. From Designers to Change Agents
2. Friction - Where Momentum Gets Stuck
3. Disconnects – When The Signal Breaks Down (You are here)
4. Systems Reliance – When The Tool Becomes The Strategy
5. Blind Spots – When Critical Signals Go Unseen
6. Stay tuned!
7. Stay tuned

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