Please answer yourself a question: How many meetings “just to align each other” did you have in the last week? Feel free to check your calendar and think about all the meetings you had with the initial purpose of alignment. All these fancy circles, squads, all-hands, or whatever they called, meetings consuming a lot of working time during a week. They are set up with the best intentions, but often they feel awkward and somehow useless because they are not fulfilling the promise they brought – alignment.

Don’t get me wrong! Alignment is important, and it is definitely one of the key drivers in agile environments. But the more I observe attempts to align in the wild, the more I see the point that there are a lot of common misunderstandings of what alignment is about.