How to Move Faster Without Creating Alignment Debt
A two-step approach to determine what slows your team and restore balance between ownership and alignment
Leaders want speed. The usual advice? Decentralize decisions. Give teams autonomy. Let them move without waiting for approval.
The advice is correct. The solution is incomplete.
Autonomy alone is not enough. Teams need more than permission to act; they need to own the outcome. They need to care about the big picture, not just their own part.
When teams have ownership but lack alignment, you get chaos. Your team moves fast, but often in the wrong direction. One group builds something that clashes with what another team is doing. Decisions that work for one team break things for everyone else. This creates alignment debt—the accumulating cost of teams working out of sync, leading to confusion, wasted work, and stalled projects.
To move fast, you need both ownership and alignment. Most teams never stop to think about where they stand on each dimension or what needs to change to find the right balance.
In this article, I’ll show you a two-step approach to help you understand your current culture and create the balance you need.
Step 1: Diagnose Where You Actually Are
To build a culture that promotes both speed and experimentation, start by understanding your present situation. Map your current state along two key dimensions: ownership and alignment.
Why ownership, not just autonomy? Both matter, but ownership is more powerful. Autonomy means letting people make decisions—permitting them to act. Ownership means people actually want to take action. As I explain in this article, a culture of ownership has five components:
1. Meaningful work, where people feel they’re part of something important
2. A product mindset instead of a project mentality
3. Distributed decision-making rights to the lowest possible levels
4. A “pick up the trash” mentality: doing what needs to be done, even if it’s not your job
5. Focusing on the metrics that really move the needle, not vanity ones
Autonomy is freedom given by leaders. Ownership is the inner drive to use that freedom for the team’s success.
Alignment on purpose, not just goals. This isn’t about cascaded goals or visions. It’s about everyone understanding why the team exists and what matters. When the purpose is clear, people can make their own decisions while still moving everyone in the same direction. Without it, even the best teams drift apart.
The canvas maps these two dimensions and reveals four types of culture:
Micromanagement Culture (low ownership, low alignment): Leaders control everything because trust is not there. There’s no shared purpose. People show up, wait to be told what to do, and execute their tasks. Energy is low. Nothing moves fast because there’s no ownership.
Micromanagement culture is like a piano lesson where the teacher dictates every note to play. Students follow instructions without thinking. They want to finish the lesson, not enjoy the music.
Top-Down Culture (high alignment, low ownership): Clear hierarchy and authority. Leaders set directions, teams execute. People understand the goals but don’t feel responsible for the results. They comply but aren’t committed. Decisions are organized, but execution is lifeless—people do what they’re told without caring whether it works.
Top-down culture is like an orchestra with a strict conductor. The performance is precise and coordinated, but no one dares deviate. The score controls everything, not the musicians.
Entrepreneurial Culture (low alignment, high ownership): High energy, but scattered. People care deeply and take initiative, but there’s no shared understanding of the bigger picture. Teams work hard on their own pieces, make decisions quickly, and wonder why handoffs break. Freedom without coordination creates chaos.
Entrepreneurial culture is like a room full of solo musicians, each playing a different genre. Everyone has talent and energy, but they’re not playing together. It sounds like several bands in one room.
Innovative Culture (high alignment, high ownership): Clarity of purpose, freedom to choose how to get there. Leaders align on the “why,” teams decide the “how.” People feel responsible for the team’s success and work together naturally because they share a direction. Speed compounds instead of breaking apart.
Innovative culture is like a jazz band. Everyone knows the main tune and trusts each other to improvise. Different people lead at various times. Sometimes the piano leads, sometimes the saxophone or bass takes over. Everyone is in sync and ready to adapt. They have freedom, but they’re totally aligned.
How to facilitate the Alignment Ownership Canvas
You can run this with your leadership team or your own team. Assessing the overall organizational culture across multiple teams requires a more complex analysis. We help companies do this by bringing in an outside perspective and expertise with the tool.
Download the templates (remember you cannot modify, edit, or remove the branding from them)
Bring your team together and reflect on the past 3–6 months
Think of specific moments: a product launch, a decision that dragged, a project that got stuck, or a win that felt effortless
For each moment, ask: Where does this fit? High or low ownership? High or low alignment?
Look for patterns. Do most moments fall into one quadrant? Do you swing between two?
Talk through disagreements. If someone sees a “successful” project as top-down, while others see it as innovative, that difference shows that people experience the culture differently
The conversation matters more than getting the exact placement right
We use a specific set of questions for each quadrant when working with clients, but the canvas itself provides the framework to start the conversation and see where you really are.
Step 2: Figure Out What to Change
Once you’ve diagnosed where you are, use the Future State Canvas to design what needs to change. It uses four questions that surface what’s getting in your way and what would help you improve.
The structure is deliberate. The left side exposes friction—what’s hindering alignment and ownership right now. The right side shows solutions—what would help you improve both. This order is important because most teams try to fix things before even identifying the actual problem.
The four alignment/ownership questions:
What is hindering my alignment? What prevents you from connecting to your team’s purpose? Common blocks: conflicting priorities, unclear strategy, not knowing why decisions are made, or not understanding how your work fits the bigger picture. Or, even worse, your team has no purpose.
What would help me better align with the team’s purpose and goals? What would give you clarity? Be specific. “Better communication” is too vague. “A monthly update from leadership on what changed and why” is more specific. “Quarterly review of cross-functional priorities” is actionable, too.
What’s hindering my sense of ownership? What makes it hard to feel responsible for results? Common problems: unclear about who’s accountable for what, prioritizing individual metrics over collective ones, not trusting other teams will do their part, fearing you will be blamed if things fail, and being rewarded even if results aren’t met.
What would support me in taking greater ownership of my work? What would make you care more about team results? Be specific. “More autonomy” is vague. “Authority to make trade-off decisions between speed and quality without escalation” is specific. “Team metrics that reflect collective results, not just individual work” is concrete.
How to facilitate the Future State Canvas
Have each team member answer the four questions on their own. Then get together to discuss answers. Capture all responses on one canvas.
As the facilitator, look for three things: commonalities (problems everyone agrees are blocking progress), contradictions (where people experience the culture differently), and surprises (things you didn’t expect).
Don’t force agreement. Discuss the differences and contradictions. Disagreement is not noise, but a signal. The friction between “too much control” and “not enough direction” uncovers real trade-offs your team must navigate.
Notice what’s missing. If nobody mentions collaboration issues with other teams, that could be a sign of avoidance. Probe deeper: Where are we not aligned? What cross-team issues are we avoiding? What once worked but now holds us back? What do other teams do well that we haven’t adopted yet? What practices have you seen elsewhere that could raise our game?
Finally, define actions using the start-stop-continue framework:
· Start: What should we begin doing to improve alignment and ownership?
· Stop: What are we doing that’s blocking one or both dimensions?
· Continue: What’s working that we should keep doing?
For each action, have team members volunteer to lead it. Assign clear ownership—who will do what by when. This makes ownership real: people choosing to take responsibility for improving team culture, not waiting to be told.
Moving Faster Without Alignment Debt
Speed requires both alignment and ownership working together. When everyone understands the team purpose (and goals) and feels responsible for collective outcomes, decisions happen faster, collaboration flows smoothly, and energy builds up.
These two canvases give you a path to get there. They surface the culture you have, reveal what’s holding you back, and turn learnings into actions. The real work starts after, with adopting better methods to make decisions, eliminating unnecessary norms, and crafting collaboration agreements.
If you need help facilitating these conversations or building the practices that build alignment and ownership, reach out, and let’s discuss how we help teams like yours.
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This is an absolute gem again, Gustavo!! Thank you.
What I've seen in practise is exactly that. Teams that are aligned - but there's not enough (structural) psychological safety in the company culture that allows for "stuff that didn't work". (also called mistakes).
On the other hand I've seen teams where "find out what doesn't work" was not an issue, but alignment was missing. That's a bit like letting half a dozen kamikazes on the loose towards a goal.
I can see these 2 canvases working particularly well in big organisations.
Grazie! 🌷