WHAT IS THE ALIGNMENT GAP?
A word gets used in a meeting. Everyone nods. Everyone means something slightly different by it.
Agreement is everyone saying yes. Alignment is everyone understanding why, and what it asks of them specifically. In the room, the two feel identical. The difference only shows up later, in the work, when it is expensive.
The Alignment Gap is a weekly comic series about where agreement ends and interpretation begins. Innovation. Equity. Ownership. Focus. Quality. Every one of these words feels obvious in the room and splits into different meanings the moment work begins.
Neither person in these stories is careless. Both readings are reasonable. That is exactly what makes the gap so hard to see, and so expensive when it surfaces after the work is done.
THE PERSON BEHIND IT
The series is created by Stavros Stavru, Ph.D., an alignment researcher and co-founder of AhaPlay ↗.
For more than two decades, Stavros has worked with teams and organisations as a software engineer, team leader, trainer, consultant and researcher. His PhD focused on organisational transformation, and he is the author of the bestselling Never Stop Experimenting ↗.
Across that work, he kept seeing the same small moment.
A team agrees on a word. Everyone leaves satisfied. Weeks later, the work comes back in two different shapes and nobody can point to where it went wrong, because nothing did. Nobody misheard.
The problem was not agreement. It was what everyone thought the agreement meant.
He started The Alignment Gap because that moment is difficult to explain and immediately recognisable once you see it drawn.
THE CONNECTION TO AHAPLAY
The Alignment Gap began as an AhaPlay ↗ project to make alignment gaps easier to see and talk about.
AhaPlay works on the same problem from another direction: helping teams turn shared words, decisions and priorities into shared understanding and coordinated action.
The comics show what happens when that gap remains hidden.