I feel lucky to have a job that revolves around fussing with sentences. Rarely, though, do I feel quite as lucky as I did last week, when I came across a web page so soaked in heavy-duty management jargon that it could just about make you grateful to dig ditches, so long as you didn’t have to talk like this. Leaders had to “strengthen existing alignment structures” and identify “significant areas for alignment enhancement.” There were “collaborative roadmapping sessions” and “cross-functional collaboration scores.” Some unlucky workers would even be designated “alignment champions.”
As I type this, someone in a suburban office park is probably getting roped into a tedious meeting about aligning departmental K.P.I.s — while someone else, out in the Bay Area, ponders A.I.’s “alignment problem,” wondering how to make new models behave in the ways humans prefer. And yet it still feels strange to call “aligned” jargon, because the thing it expresses is so ordinary; even small children have other ways of saying it. Things that are aligned are in some kind of order relative to one another: straight, flush, level, even, parallel, similarly oriented, facing the same direction — most literally, lined up in an actual line. When English started using the word, in the 18th century, it was often for arrangements of soldiers. Soon enough it could apply to things like rows of standing stones or to political alliances. By 1877, things had abstracted enough for a St. Louis newspaper to say a man accused of wrongdoing was “out of alignment with the Confession of Faith to which he subscribed.” Just about anything can “line up,” if you want it to.
When did this metaphor become such an office mainstay? Earlier this year, a consultant named Kristin Kaufman wrote that when she started a business called Alignment Inc. two decades ago, she bought the URL from a car-alignment garage; back then, she said, the word was for chiropractors and auto mechanics. (Also, surely, orthodontists.) But it’s hard to blame corporate management for embracing it: Somebody has to try to make sprawling businesses act coherently, coordinating departments as if lining up tires on an aging van. “When teams operate in silos,” said that terrifying business website from last week, “they often develop competing priorities that undermine companywide goals.” True alignment “transforms these scattered efforts into a unified force that drives strategic execution.” I may be pained by the way this is expressed, or by the fact that office workers now spend more time discussing silos than farmers do, but: Yeah, sure, fair enough.
In practice, though, hearing this language in the office is not always popular. Part of the problem is pure mindless repetition. (A business strategist recently wrote on Substack that “once out of sheer annoyance I counted its appearance 67 times during one workweek.”) A bigger issue is that while “alignment” sounds cooperative — everyone on the same page and rowing in the same direction — it requires the choice of a page to be on and a direction to row, which is inevitably dictated from above. A vice president at one business research firm says “alignment” is “coercion dressed up like collaboration” and often translates to something like: “You are wrong, and I am right, and you need to start pretending that you agree with me or we’re going to have real problems here.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce website offers advice on how to make underperforming employees “realign with role expectations.” Being aligned is also falling in line, toeing the line, dealing with those who step out of line.
But “aligned” is too broad and slippery to be pinned down by such criticisms. Does it demand conformity and obedience? Of course not, various consultants say; it’s really about “clarity in priorities” or “consistency between words and actions.”
Nor does it need to be about business. The internet is packed with advice about emotional alignment — “bringing your feelings, thoughts and actions into genuine coherence” so your psyche is less dysfunctional than your workplace might be. One psychologist suggests conducting periodic self-audits and check-ins and asking, “Where am I acting out of alignment with what I believe or value?”
Or there’s the more cutting-edge question: Where are my next-gen A.I. agents acting out of alignment with what I believe or value? Ever since the days of room-size mainframes, computer scientists have worried about making sure that computers operate in the ways that humans intend, a worry that A.I. has made much less theoretical. Human values are complex, contested, difficult to articulate and hard enough to instill in young human beings; how do you put them in a bunch of servers? Around 2014, it was felt that “friendly A.I. problem” might not be the best way to refer to this; by some accounts, it was the computer scientist Stuart Russell who started calling it a “value alignment problem” instead.
Jargon often names things that are subtle or hyperspecific: technical distinctions, legal niceties, esoteric concepts. That stuff tends to stay jargon. The terms that really thrive are, often, the ones that offer airless, fluorescent-lit, lanyard-equipped shorthand for things you could just as easily have put into plain language. There’s not a single “alignment” in the paragraphs above that could not be replaced by other words or expressions. We like things to work together, agree, match, mesh, sync, jibe, cooperate. We want everyone pulling together, in concert, in the same boat, wearing the same jersey, on the same wavelength, reading from the same script, speaking the same language. The left hand must know what the right hand is doing. Common purposes, not cross purposes. Shared understanding, consistency, focus, ducks in a row, well-oiled machines: There is absolutely no shortage of ways to describe the desire for order.
But picking one would require thought and energy that most of us are eager not to waste — and the wrong choice might suggest that our core competencies are misaligned with all the other collaborative roadmapping heroes in the working group.
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.
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