Alignment as stewardship under complexity

Where lack of alignment shows up first

Over the past few years, I’ve been spending time with organisations that don’t often make national headlines.

They are member-based institutions, regional system stewards, and organisations with long-term obligations to communities rather than markets. They operate under contested mandates, close governance scrutiny, and high expectations of trust.

What’s struck me is not that their challenges are unique but that they are early.

Because these organisations can’t hide misalignment behind scale, alignment issues surface quickly and clearly. Tensions between mandate and commercial reality, short-term pressures and long-term stewardship, governance caution and the need to adapt. They all show up in the board room fairly rapidly.

In larger systems, those same tensions are often present, but buffered. They can be absorbed by complexity, redistributed across layers, or managed through process for a time. Eventually, though, they surface and usually at much higher cost.

One of the patterns I keep seeing is that organisations rarely struggle because of a lack of effort, intelligence, or intent. More often, they are being asked to operate within systems where purpose, authority, capability, incentives, and time horizons are pulling in different directions.

When those dynamics remain implicit, leaders spend enormous energy compensating for the system. When they become visible, something shifts: decision-making improves, trust increases, and reactivity reduces not because the work is easier, but because it becomes more coherent.

What I now realise is how transferable these observations are.

At the end of last year, I attended and contributed to the Leadership Development Summit, hosted by Australian Rural Leadership Foundation, Menzies Leadership Foundation and the The Australian National University, a follow on from the inaugural one Tasmanian Leaders hosted in 2024. The sessions were valuable deep and complex conversations but it was the offline conversations shared over food and other moments that revealed something fascinating.

The same questions regional boards and executive teams are now asking about stewardship, alignment, and whether the system can hold complexity without constant intervention are increasingly being asked in national organisations and institutions as well.

That suggests something important: smaller and regional systems aren’t behind. In many cases, they’re ahead and acting as early indicators of challenges the rest of us are only just beginning to name.

As pressures continue to accumulate across sectors, the organisations that fare best may not be the ones that move fastest or restructure most often, but the ones that learn how to make their alignment dynamics visible and therefore governable.

Where are alignment tensions in your organisation being carried implicitly rather than governed explicitly?

Katy Cooper is an experienced Futurist, trained through The Institute for the Future, POLI-Design at Milan POLI.technic and Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies. She has also studied Disruptive Innovation with INSEAD. She holds a Graduate Diploma of Management (GradDipMgt) from Australian Institute of Business. Katy is an exceptional Experience Designer and Facilitator. She helps organisations and communities build strategic plans and leadership capability for a future they can’t see yet through her foresight-driven, whole systems design practice.