The theme is already printed on the lanyard. Something about One Team, or Better Together, or a single word with a full stop after it that a branding agency was paid a serious sum to arrive at. Two days at a property far enough from the office that nobody can slip back to their desk. Good coffee. A facilitator who will, at some point, ask everyone to stand up and physically move to a corner of the room that represents their conflict style. The diagnosis is on the printed agenda before the first session begins. Our senior leaders operate in silos. They optimise for their own function. They do not collaborate. The remedy, helpfully, is also on the agenda. Alignment. By Friday afternoon there will be a shared scoreboard drawn on a flip chart, a round of commitments made in front of peers, and a group photograph in which everyone looks, for the length of the exposure, genuinely aligned.
We were once asked to run one of these. We said we would be glad to, and then we asked to see something before we designed a single minute of it. Not the org chart. The compensation plans. The individual scorecards each of these leaders was actually paid against, the numbers that would decide their bonus, their standing, and whether next year was a good one or a quiet humiliation. We wanted to read the real agenda, the one nobody had printed on a lanyard.
The Leaders Were Aligned. Their Targets Weren't.
The leaders who had been described to us as misaligned turned out to be aligned with something close to perfection. Each one was aligned, precisely and rationally, to a target that had been designed to sit in direct tension with the person seated across the table from them. The head of sales was paid on booked revenue and would book anything with a signature on it. The head of delivery was paid on margin and utilisation and could only protect both by refusing exactly the kind of deal sales was rewarded for signing. The head of product was measured on roadmap velocity, which meant every custom promise sales made to close a quarter arrived on his desk as sabotage wearing the label of a customer commitment. None of these three was behaving badly. Each was behaving impeccably. They were model employees of three different companies that happened to share a building.
The offsite was going to ask them to trust one another. Their pay was asking them to defeat one another. It is not a close contest, and it never has been. People read the document that governs their mortgage far more carefully than the one that governs their feelings, and they are right to. The flip chart said we are one team. The scorecard said you are graded alone, against them, next quarter. Everybody in that room could do the arithmetic, which is why the warmth generated over two catered days evaporated somewhere on the drive back, roughly at the moment the first real trade-off of the new week landed in an inbox.
What the organisation told itself about all this was the most flattering story available. Silo mentality. A culture issue. A leadership maturity gap that the right development intervention would close. Culture is the explanation of choice in these situations for one simple reason. It implicates nobody who actually built the machine. It does not point at the person who set three colliding targets in the same planning cycle and then expressed disappointment that they collided. It points instead at some vague atmospheric failing in the leaders themselves, a deficiency of character or generosity, which can be addressed with a workshop and does not require anyone senior to admit that the friction is not a bug in the culture but the specified output of the design.
And the friction is expensive in ways the offsite budget never counts. Every genuinely cross-functional decision has to climb, because the structure cannot resolve on its own floor a conflict it was built to manufacture. The chief executive becomes the only integrating layer in the entire company, the single human junction where sales, delivery and product are finally forced into the same reality, which is a magnificent use of the most expensive calendar in the building. Coordination stops being a background function and becomes the job. Meetings breed meetings. And the leaders, watched, learn to perform alignment in the room and defend their number the instant they leave it, because the number is real and the alignment is a poster.
You Cannot Facilitate Your Way Out of a Structural Conflict.
The entire premise of the alignment workshop is that the conflict is interpersonal. That if these two leaders simply understood each other better, extended a little more good faith, discovered over a trust exercise that they were both human beings with children and hobbies, the friction would ease. But there was nothing between them to understand. They understood each other completely. Each knew exactly what the other was doing and precisely why, because each would have done the identical thing in the other's chair. The conflict was not a misunderstanding waiting to be talked through. It was a correct, mutual, fully-informed reading of a structure that had been solved for the parts and never once for the whole. Somebody had optimised each function locally and neglected, entirely, to check whether the local optima added up to anything a company could actually use.
Here is the reframe the brief is paying us, however unknowingly, to resist. A leadership problem you can facilitate away was never a leadership problem. If two days of goodwill and a ropes course genuinely fix it, it was interpersonal all along, and congratulations. But if it regresses the moment the goodwill collides with the next quarter's targets, and it always does, then what you were looking at was never a deficiency in your leaders. It was an architecture that had quietly made collaboration a personal sacrifice, a thing each leader could only offer by underperforming their own scorecard, and you had been relying on individual generosity to paper over a structural fault for so long that you had started to mistake the exhaustion of the generous for a talent problem. The alignment you purchase at an offsite has a shelf life measured in weeks, because the machine that mass-produces the misalignment is running again on Monday morning, and it does not take Fridays off to attend workshops.
We Redrew the Scoreboard, Not the Seating Chart.
So we did not run the alignment session. We rebuilt the thing that was manufacturing the misalignment, which was the goal architecture itself. That meant identifying the specific target pairs that guaranteed collision and dissolving them, replacing a set of local numbers that could only be won at each other's expense with a smaller number of shared outcomes that no single leader could move alone and none could ignore. It meant building one forum where cross-functional trade-offs were resolved by design, on a defined cadence, with real authority, so that the resolution of a sales-versus-margin conflict stopped depending on whether the chief executive happened to have a free half-hour that week. It photographs poorly. There is no flip chart, no lanyard, no closing photograph of leaders with their arms around one another. There is only the distinctly less telegenic fact of a company whose functions have stopped colliding because they are no longer paid to.
This is most of what SSUNDAR actually does, and nearly all of it happens before anything gets designed or delivered. We read the request for leadership development as a symptom to be diagnosed rather than an instruction to be executed. We go looking for the layer where the structure is authoring the behaviour that everyone has agreed to call a people problem, because that is almost always the layer at which the behaviour is genuinely decided, and it is almost never the layer the brief points to. Then we rebuild that. It is slower than booking a venue. It generates no testimonials about how energising the two days were. What it generates instead is the collaboration the offsite could not manufacture with any amount of catering, arriving on its own, unprompted, the moment the targets stopped punishing it.
The organisations that keep booking the offsites are not wrong about the friction. They can feel it, and it is real, and it is costing them more than they have ever tried to measure. They are wrong about its address. They keep sending their leaders away to be repaired when the fault is not in the leaders at all but in the scoreboard that greets them the day they return. Leadership development aimed at a structural conflict is expensive theatre with an excellent caterer, and the standing ovation it earns is the most misleading data your organisation will collect all year.
You cannot build trust between two people you are paying to defeat each other. The scoreboard is the real facilitator, and it runs a session every single day.
Your leaders are aligned to exactly what you chose to pay them for. The misalignment you keep sending them away to fix is the one you designed.