The board of a state-focused foundation whose mission is to improve the health of its underprivileged citizens is creating a new five-year strategic plan. As the board evaluates the impact of the foundation’s grants over the last five years, several board members express concerns that the foundation might be headed in the wrong direction. While some of the individual programs the foundation funds have resulted in impressive successes, the board hasn’t seen enough improvement on overall health indicators for the underprivileged. Every board member supports the foundation’s mission, and while the board feels good about what the foundation has achieved across the state, they wonder why the results don’t reflect greater impact. Does the foundation’s overall direction need to change radically to get the results they hope for? Some members seem eager to embrace a new direction; others are feeling the need to be more cautious.

Gabriela is serving on a cross-functional team designing and implementing an onboarding process for all new employees. Team members know what they are trying to achieve; they worked together to craft a team charter that everyone supports. They’ve put in place a plan to accomplish the work and assigned specific tasks to each team member. However, the team is falling behind its timelines and Gabriela is worried. Sometimes the team seems unclear about who is responsible for what, and they have to revisit and clarify assignments. She also has noticed that the team gets bogged down when trying to reconcile different ideas about how best to design some aspects of the overall process. She doesn’t think the team has a direction problem, but are they struggling with aligning their work?

Deon is the project manager for a new product development team responsible for developing the next big innovation in the organization’s most important product line. The team has extensive market research into customer needs, representatives from critical organization departments, and a substantial budget for prototyping and testing. Unfortunately, the team is experiencing extensive quality issues with the first prototype they sent to market testing. At each of their last three team meetings, at least 1–2 members have been absent due to schedule conflicts or competing deadlines. Since none of the team members report directly to Deon, he struggles with how to get the group to commit the time and effort required to address the quality issues so that the team can achieve its goals.

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