Alignment is not a one-time achievement — once stakeholders agree on goals, that agreement erodes as people get pulled toward other priorities, forget the original reasoning, or drift back toward default assumptions. Goals and rationale need to be actively repeated and reinforced on an ongoing basis, not just agreed to once and filed away.
Distinguishes the maintenance phase of alignment from the decision phase covered by Disagree and Commit, and is one reason Mining for Conflict (Testing Apparent Consensus) needs to be applied repeatedly rather than as a single kickoff-meeting check.
Alignment decays because people get distracted by other, more urgent priorities — not because they changed their mind. Treating one successful round of alignment as a permanent state is the mistake; the fix is repetition: keep reminding stakeholders of the goals, why the work matters, and what's already done versus what's coming next, on a recurring cadence rather than once at kickoff.
Из тем: Stakeholder Power and Trust