The strategy meeting ends well. Heads nod. The deck is approved. Everyone leaves with the sense that the room was aligned. Then execution begins, and within two weeks the same decision is being interpreted four different ways across four functions.

This is the pattern senior leaders are describing most consistently right now. The problem is not the absence of strategy. It is the distance between agreement in the room and alignment in the organization. We call that distance alignment debt, and it comes due later — as duplicated effort, escalations, rework, and messages that contradict each other by the time