Alignment Theatre Is Expensive

Alignment theatre is the term Hanadi Usman, a PMO director with more than 15 years in enterprise transformation, uses for the gap between what teams say in the steering committee and what they admit in the corridor afterward. The dashboards are green, the sponsors nod, the minutes record consensus, and the program bleeds quietly for six more weeks. Her argument: the fix is not a better reporting framework but psychological safety built into governance design, so surfacing the real picture is safer than protecting the performed one.