Alignment Theatre Is Expensive

The steering committee meets. The slides are polished. The RAG status is green across every workstream. Every sponsor nods. Every lead confirms they are on track. Forty-five minutes later, the meeting ends and everyone files out.

And as people move into the corridor, into the elevator, into the quiet of their own offices, the real conversations begin. This is the part that never makes the minutes. It is also the part that decides whether the program lives.

Hanadi Usman coined the term for what she had watched too many times: rooms where everyone pretended to agree and nothing actually moved. She calls it alignment theatre. Nobody lied in that room. Nobody had to. They performed alignment - and the organization pays the difference.

The cost of the performance does not arrive as a single catastrophe. It arrives as the slow accumulation of decisions made on false assumptions. Timelines built on commitments nobody believed were real. Budgets approved against business cases that three people in the room privately knew were optimistic.

Usman has seen the pattern across healthcare, financial services, the public sector, technology and non-profits. Across small teams and portfolios worth billions. Across cultures, geographies and governance structures of every kind. The pattern is always the same: when people do not feel safe enough to surface the real picture, they produce a version of it that the room can tolerate.

The organizations Usman has walked into mid-crisis were rarely surprised by what broke. They were surprised by how long it had been breaking without anyone saying it out loud. The break was visible in hindsight to nearly everyone. The silence around it was the actual failure.

And so the antidote is not a better reporting framework. It is not a more sophisticated dashboard. Adding another column to the status report does not make a frightened team honest. It is psychological safety embedded into governance design - built into how decisions get made, not bolted on as a values poster.

When that safety is missing, Usman offers a blunt reframe. You are not running an organization. You are running parallel projects with shared branding. Everyone shares a logo and a slide template; nobody shares the same picture of reality.

The gap between what people say in the room and what they say in the corridor is not gossip. It is a measurement. It is exactly what the transformation is costing - a number that never appears on the dashboard, and always appears in the outcome.

Hanadi Usman is a PMO director and program leader with more than 15 years in the messy middle of enterprise change. Her credentials sit right in her byline - BCom, MBA - and her tagline is a small act of defiance against her own industry: clarity, not complexity.

Her work runs through PCI compliance, Azure cloud migrations and governance design, delivered across sectors from finance to non-profit. She has led a pension benefits transformation at CIBC Mellon and spent years coordinating the kind of cross-team programs where alignment theatre is most likely to take the stage. She writes about it publicly because she believes naming the pattern is the first step to ending it.