Three leaders, one plan — or so everyone assumes.
Ask your executive sponsor, your board, and your program lead the same three questions about your AI priorities — separately — and the answers usually don't match. Misalignment rarely looks like an argument. It looks like three confident people each running a slightly different program.
By Joe Perone, Senior Principal Last updated
What we talked through
One initiative, three definitions of success — and all three are held with equal confidence:
- The executive sponsor (ED or CEO) wants "an AI strategy" and mission or business impact.
- The board wants risk minimized and a defensible, fiduciary story.
- The program lead wants workload reduced and something shippable.
Here's the trap: alignment almost never breaks at the mission — everyone agrees "we should use AI." It breaks at the metric, where almost nobody agrees what winning actually looks like. A related failure mode is sponsorship without authority — a champion who's genuinely excited but can't unblock data access, budget, or staff time. Three questions, answered independently, surface both fast:
- Success: what does success look like in 90 days?
- Trade-off: what are we willing to stop doing to make room for this?
- Authority: who has the authority to say no, or to kill it?
The point isn't to win the argument. It's to make disagreement visible while it's still cheap — before kickoff, not after. And it's worth naming the harder possibility out loud: sometimes misalignment isn't a communication gap at all, but a genuine disagreement about priorities everyone's been avoiding.
Interactive · ~90 seconds
The Alignment Test
Fill in each stakeholder's answer to the three questions — as one person imagining all three views, or share the page and have three people fill their own column. Each question flags whether the answers align or diverge.
1. Success — what does it look like in 90 days?
Awaiting input2. Trade-off — what will we stop doing to make room?
Awaiting input3. Authority — who can say no or kill it?
Awaiting inputAlignment read
Fill in at least two columns on a question to see whether they align.
A conversation starter, not a verdict — matching text is a rough proxy. The value is in comparing the answers out loud.
Take it with you
The three alignment questions
| Question | Aligned looks like | Divergent looks like |
|---|---|---|
| 90-day success | One shared, specific picture of a win 90 days out. | Strategy vs. risk-avoidance vs. shipped feature. |
| Trade-off | Agreement on what gets paused to make room. | Everyone expects it to be done "on top of" today's work. |
| Authority | One clear person who can say no or kill it. | A champion with enthusiasm but no power to unblock. |
Run it with your real stakeholders
Get the Alignment Test as a shareable one-pager
A printable version you can hand to your sponsor, a board member, and your program lead — three columns, three questions, filled in independently. We'll email it now.
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