Alignment
It's Not Just For Your Tires Anymore
Alignment is one of those words I used to love.
Then I spent years inside organizations that repeated it like a Harry Potter spell while designing systems that undermined everything they said they cared about, and I started to feel like Hermione insisting, “It’s levi‑O‑sa, not levi‑o‑SAR.”
At some point, “alignment” stopped meaning the relationship between values, structures, and behavior and started meaning a slide in a deck that lets us pretend those things match.
Or worse, an excuse to put the person brave enough to raise their hand and call out problems on the “no” list because they “aren’t aligned”. But like Bruno, we don’t talk about that.
So if I’m going to keep using the word at all, I have to start with the place where the hypocrisy would be most obvious: my own company. What does it look like to build something where the operating system actually matches the ideas on the wall?
I talk about culture in all its iterations and what it takes to build an authentic culture in multiple ways. I literally named my company Truer Words because I believe so thoroughly in how important alignment is.
When the words on your wall match the people you hire, but the experience you provide does not the result is disillusionment, disengagement and burnout. Fake values do not benefit anyone long term.
So now I’m faced with the question “what does it look like to build a company that treats *its own* ideas as real, worthy, true……as actual good ideas you’re willing to design around?” Like eating your own dog food. (Weird saying, btw)
Pitch Slapped Into Clarity
One of the stranger parts of building Truer Words since July has been the flood of pitches from people who clearly haven’t read a word I’ve written. Not “this isn’t quite a fit” misalignment. Structural misalignment. Products designed to push me toward hyper‑growth by turning my own clients into a dependent revenue stream, delivered in outreach emails that embody every default I’m trying to dismantle. If they had read even one essay, they would know I was going to say no….and not because I’m some super tough negotiator. I’m saying no as a matter of design, as a matter of adherence to my values, as a matter of principle.
Most of us are very good at telling other organizations to align their systems with their values. Be we don’t always have the opportunity for building our own work in a way that would pass our own diagnostics, our own standards.
This is my attempt to name what it feels like to build Truer Words and the Defaults Ecosystem as a company that has to live inside the same ideas it is asking everyone else to adopt.
If you want to see what I mean by “treating ideas as real,” let’s look at one concrete place it shows up in my work.
The EEDM Was About Other People (At First)
When I first wrote about the Employee Experience Dynamics Model (embedded below) a year ago, I thought I was building a decision-making tool for leaders who kept sacrificing culture on the altar of scale. The pattern was familiar: the larger an organization got, the more it defaulted to culture-killing standardization and then acted surprised when everything started to feel generic and brittle. And it was that. But it was also more.
The model was my attempt to say, “you don’t have to do it this way,” to show that you can standardize some parts of employee experience so you can *protect* differentiation where it actually matters. What I didn’t name at the time was that I was already doing defaults work: I was mapping the unspoken assumption that “grown‑up” organizations must trade nuance for scale.
Looking back through The Default Directive lens, I can see the nested defaults I was working against: that efficiency requires uniformity, that personalization is childish, that anything you can’t put in a template doesn’t count as real work. EEDM was my way of refusing that framing, of refuting what we all accepted as “the way it is” and showing that the tradeoff between scale and culture was a design choice, not a law of nature.
Using EEDM in Designing Truer Words
The EEDM splits employee experience into layers: the foundational stability that should be consistent, the growth and performance layer where you blend standardization and differentiation, and the upper layer where belonging and meaning live. It’s a structural argument for not forcing everything through the same mold. It was built for employee experience, but the logic holds for customer journeys too, and I used it to design the journey through my own offering ecosystem.
If you look at the Truer Words site with that model in mind, it’s a blueprint for my own business.
(Note you can’t ACTUALLY look yet. The public version is still in process because, unsurprisingly, I couldn’t just hand this to anyone with a template and call it done, I needed someone who understood what I’m trying to do.)
- Foundational stability lives in artifacts: the Default Directive book, the Starter Course, Seed Sessions, and the Substack essays that make the theory public. These are the things that should scale. Shared language, basic tools, default literacy are distributed and scalable infrastructure so leaders don’t have to wait for a consultant to show up to start seeing their own systems.
- The middle layer is the structured path: Seed Session → Starter Course → Root Workshop → Cultivation Intensive → Greenhouse Cohort. The formats are recognizable and repeatable, but how an organization moves through them depends on their readiness and authority over systems.
- The top layer is deliberately scarce: embedded diagnostic engagements are limited to a handful each year, focused on one knot in one organization’s infrastructure. That work is not meant to scale, and I say that out loud because the whole point is to keep high‑judgment, system‑specific work from getting flattened into “programming.”
In other words: the knowledge scales, the access to me does not. That is not a marketing line, it’s the operating system. And it’s extraordinarily unlikely I’ll ever be 10X’ing anything at all. Hopefully that means I also get to skip the 5 am wake-ups and the ice baths!
Refusing the Default Consulting Model
The default consulting model is tidy. Those who know things get paid to know things. You charge for your time. You give just enough insight that clients want more, but not enough that they stop needing you. You scale by training others in your methods, certifying them, and building a mini‑industry of people who replicate your frameworks under your brand.
You do not give away huge chunks of your thinking on Substack. You write a book that spends four chapters explaining why they need you and a final chapter gesturing at what might be possible with you in the room. You do not design your offers so that someone who will never meet you can still use your tools to change their systems.
I’m building the opposite.
The Default Directive is designed to sit next to a strategy deck and give leaders enough understanding and language to start doing defaults work themselves, without waiting for me. The Substack essays are not teasers; they are field guides and arguments and experiments that can be used immediately. The Starter Course is not a lead magnet; it’s a way to distribute capacity.
If I built Truer Words the way most “future of work” consultancies are built, my own defaults work would stop being true. The company would become a case study in the very problem it’s critiquing.
Oh My Lord, Do You Hate Money? Do You Want Me to Hate Money?
The level of change I’m building into Truer Words is more radical than what I ask from most organizations. I’m designing the all‑in version: a business that tries to align every major choice—offer design, scale, revenue model—with defaults work and models like the Employee Experience Dynamics Model.
I don’t expect leaders to start there. Partly because they’re carrying different risks than I am, and partly because they were never trained to see defaults in the first place.
Most of us were never taught to think about how we think at work. We were trained to operate inside systems, not to notice how those systems think for us.
Leadership development taught strategy and storytelling, not how to map the invisible instructions embedded in performance frameworks, metrics, and approvals. That’s not a personal failing; it’s a design choice our educational and operational institutions made long before we were ever in the room. (If you want the long, nerdy version of why this kind of thinking is so rare, that’s a whole other essay.)
Okay, moving on.
So when I talk about defaults with leaders, I usually start on the surface:
- If you want people studying the cosmos, maybe a rigid 9–5 in a fluorescent office isn’t the only imaginable schedule.
- If you say you’re patient‑first, maybe it matters that all your clinic slots conflict with school pickup and shift work.
- If you claim to value development, maybe it’s relevant that your performance system punishes experimentation.
These are starter examples, not the end state. And even they are surprisingly difficult for people to come up with. They feel weirdly like innovation because we’re just so used to the way things are done “everywhere.”
These surface level characteristics are the visible ripples of much deeper currents—places where the water moves enough that we can point and say, “there, that.” They give us something to grab onto while we build the much rarer skill of noticing how the water itself is shaped.
Their first experiments are smaller on purpose: move clinic hours, redesign a slice of scheduling logic, adjust how performance reviews treat learning, add one metacognitive question to a decision template. My job is to build the lab version out in the open so those moves feel imaginable, not to stand on the shore judging them and ask why they aren’t already swimming in different water.
I’m Lucky And I Know It
I know it is a privilege to be able to choose my work. Many people do not get to. That’s precisely why I refuse to burn that privilege on building yet another extraction machine with slightly better copy. Or maybe worse copy, I’m not a copywriter and it’s lightyears before I’ll have the income to pay for one.
If I’m going to spend my life thinking about defaults and design debt, then my own business becomes the place where I either prove this is possible or reveal that I don’t believe myself. Any scale I care about is in service of distribution, not dominance. I want the ideas to move farther than I personally can. I want people I will never meet to have words for the thing that’s been eating their culture alive. That’s how people can help me. Giving more rooms and platforms and amplifications of the ideas. And that’s one of the primary reasons I’m giving my shortest workshop away free.
I’ve always said I want to be paid to play with ideas all day. This is what that looks like in practice: build artifacts that travel on their own—book, essays, courses, and protect my time by keeping my presence scarce enough that I never have to betray the work to feed the machine.
The Defaults Ecosystem isn’t just one thing for that reason. The book is deep structure. The Substack is ideas in progress, and a place where I will share tools, ideas, and stories. The workshops are where you map your own water with other people in the room.
Underneath all of that is a simple bet: if more leaders get practice in thinking about thinking, about how their systems are teaching people what’s safe, smart, and possible then we don’t need to rock the foundations of every organization. We just need enough people to start treating defaults as designable instead of inevitable. Experiments that press against the boundaries of what we think of as the way things have to be, vs what actually must be true. Innovation through curiosity and reasoning.
That opens up all sorts of possibilities, not just performance reviews that will stop accidentally punishing learning, schedules that will stop contradicting stated values, and “alignment” that will finally start living in infrastructure instead of in magic words on aspirational posters.