Story 22: Boundaries
The story: The team voted for work-life boundaries. It won by a mile. Then a message arrived at 11pm: you there? It is 11pm, she wrote back. He had thought boundaries meant meetings. Messaging felt like a different thing. They had voted for the same sticky note and left with different scopes.
What it means for organisations: A vote settles whether people want something and skips over what it is. The show of hands feels like the decision being made, so the definition never gets asked for, and the more popular the item the less likely anyone is to slow it down with a question. Work-life boundaries can mean no evening meetings, no weekend messages, no after-hours anything. Everyone then enforces their own version, which means everyone is also breaking someone else's.
Where next?
Read the comic as text
The Alignment Gap, Story 22
by Stavros Stavru, Ph.D. (weallagreed.com)
Scene 1: The vote
A meeting room with a whiteboard, a hanging lamp, plants, and a table with a laptop, papers, and mugs. In the middle of the whiteboard is a yellow note reading "Let's respect work-life boundaries," with voting dots above and below it. Axel smiles as he adds his dot. Ally, holding a dot of her own, gestures toward the note enthusiastically. No one speaks.
Banner between scenes: “What could go wrong?”
Scene 2: Late at night
A split scene. On one side, Axel sits at his desk with his laptop, head in hand, looking stressed. On the other side, Ally sits at home by a window showing the moon and a night skyline, holding her phone and looking uneasy. Between them, a phone screen shows the time, 11:05, and their chat.
Ally: You there?
Axel: It's 11 p.m. Whatever happened to boundaries?
Ally: That was for meetings. Messaging's fine… right?
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