Soundings
Our Perspectives and Insights
Alignment Is Not a State. It’s a Fight Against Entropy.
Leave a hot cup of coffee on your desk and walk away. It does not stay hot. It does not get hotter. It cools toward the temperature of the room, every time, without exception, because the universe has a quiet, relentless bias toward disorder. Physicists call it entropy. The same law runs your company. Set a clear direction, align the team, win the offsite, and then walk away, and you will not come back to alignment. You will come back to drift. Direction is the hot coffee. Entropy is the room.
I learned this the expensive way. Near the end of my tenure at a previous company, I was carrying three executive roles at once, spread across different departments and functions. Each one demanded my full attention. None of them got it. With too little time for any single one, I could not keep them pointed where they needed to go. Things went idle. Things drifted. And every time something slid off the rails, hauling it back cost far more than holding it there would have. That was the trap: too little time bred drift, drift demanded remedial time, and the firefighting stole the very hours I needed for the preemptive work that prevents the next fire.
Why “We’re Aligned” Is the Most Dangerous Sentence in the Building
I wrote recently that velocity is two things, speed and direction, and that most teams obsess over the first while ignoring the second. This is the layer underneath that. Even leaders who care about direction tend to treat it as something you set once: pick the heading, announce it, and assume the organization holds it. It does not hold it. Alignment is a low-entropy state, which is another way of saying it is unnatural, expensive, and temporary. The moment you stop spending energy to maintain it, it begins to decay. A team that was genuinely aligned in January is not aligned in June by default. It is aligned in June only if someone kept paying for it.
Entropy Is the Default, Not the Exception
Order is the thing that requires work. Disorder is what happens on its own. A garden becomes weeds. A campfire becomes ash. A tidy room becomes a junk drawer the size of a house. None of that requires a villain or a crisis. It requires only time and the absence of effort.
Order is the thing that requires work. Disorder is what happens on its own.
Organizations obey the same physics. Nobody has to sabotage the strategy for it to come apart. People simply optimize their own corner, make locally reasonable choices, and respond to the pressures closest to them. Each decision feels sensible in isolation. In aggregate, the vectors spread, and a company that all agreed on the destination is now pulling in nine slightly different directions. The drift is not a failure of character. It is the default state of any system left unattended.
Show Me the Incentives and I’ll Show You the Drift
So where does the pull come from? Follow the incentives. The maxim usually credited to Charlie Munger puts the cause and effect plainly: Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome. If you want to know which direction a team is actually heading, do not read the strategy deck. Look at what gets rewarded.
Stated incentives set the direction you announce. Unstated incentives set the direction you get.
And here is the trap: the incentives that cause drift are usually not the ones written down. The stated incentive is the quarterly goal everyone applauds. The unstated incentives are the ones that actually move people: the manager who is quietly measured on headcount, so she hoards it. The team rewarded for shipping, so it ships the easy thing instead of the right thing. The salesperson paid on volume, steering the company toward customers it should be walking away from. Every one of them is behaving rationally. Every one of them is pulling the heading a few degrees off. Stated incentives set the direction you announce. Unstated incentives set the direction you get.
The Other Leak: Communication
The second great source of entropy is simpler and more forgivable. People drift because they were never grounded in the same picture of where they are going. A direction that lives only in the founder’s head, or in one slide shown once, is not a shared heading. It is a rumor. In the absence of a vivid, repeated, concrete picture of the destination, people do the most human thing possible: they fill the gap with their own version. Ten reasonable interpretations of a vague goal produce ten different headings, and all ten people will tell you, sincerely, that they are aligned.
Silence is not neutral. An uncommunicated direction does not hold steady. It decays into whatever each person assumed it meant.
A Framework: How to Fight Entropy
You do not beat entropy. You pay it, continuously, like rent. Five habits keep a company’s vectors pointed the same way.
- Re-state the heading on a schedule. Alignment has a half-life. Assume the direction you set last quarter has already faded by half, and say it again, in plainer words, more often than feels necessary.
- Audit the real incentives, not the stated ones. Run the Munger test on every team: forget the goal on the wall, and ask what behavior actually gets rewarded here. Where the two disagree, the incentive wins. Fix the incentive, not the slogan.
- Over-communicate the destination, concretely. Replace the abstract goal with a picture specific enough that two people in different departments would describe it the same way. Vague directions are entropy’s favorite fuel.
- Measure drift, not just motion. A busy company looks aligned. Stop measuring how fast everyone is moving and start measuring whether this quarter’s decisions still point the same way as the strategy. Motion is not heading.
- Budget energy for alignment as a standing cost. Stop treating alignment as an event you hold once a year. It is a recurring expense, like security or maintenance. Put someone on it, fund it, and expect to keep funding it forever.
The Bottom Line: Order Is Rented, Never Owned
Every organization is always, quietly, coming apart. That is not pessimism. It is physics. The companies that stay aligned are not the ones that found the perfect strategy and locked it in. They are the ones that accepted there is no locking it in, and built the habit of correcting course, again and again, against a current that never stops pulling.
Direction beats chaos. But only for as long as you keep paying for direction. Stop, and entropy always wins.