The Alignment Exercise
The Alignment Exercise — what it addresses.
A gap doesn’t stay small. It widens.
Two sides start aligned. Then one small unspoken difference — about what the market is for, who you actually lose to, whether problems get heard — quietly compounds. By the time it shows up in the numbers, the gap has been widening for months. The exercise measures it while it’s still cheap to close.
How a gap becomes the cost
- It starts as agreement. Both sides think they’re aligned on purpose, the competitor, the plan. Nobody is wrong on purpose.
- A difference goes unspoken. The region stops raising a problem; HQ reads the silence as fine. The two pictures begin to part.
- Decisions compound it. Roadmap, budget and patience get set against the wrong read — each choice widens the gap.
- Then it’s the number. Deals stall, good people leave, and the market gets abandoned just before it would have worked.
What it measures — four domains
A regional team and their headquarters answer the same eighteen questions across four domains, independently — neither sees the other. The finding is the distance between the answers: where you diverge, what it’s costing, and where each side is wrong about the other.
- Purpose — what the market is for, and how long it gets.
- Reality — what is actually happening in deals.
- Power — what the region can decide, and how fast anything moves.
- Trust — what each side thinks of the other’s judgement.
Both sides, measured, with the finding. ¥98,000 (approx. US$700).
Who’s behind it
ISSHONI is built by Rieko Uesaki — a member of the team that launched Shopify in Japan, now advising companies on cross-border go-to-market and internal alignment.