Whole: Why Real Results Come from Alignment, Not Doing Everything Yourself

What if you didn't need to give your all? Best suited for: over-functioners, quiet resisters, anyone who’s tired of carrying more than they should.

Why do some people get away with doing the bare minimum while others end up wiped out?

You're part of a volunteer group, a cross-functional team, or a school committee. Roles are defined, and deadlines are set. But somehow, you're moving it all forward: research, slides, follow-ups, coordination, outreach to people who don't respond or respond too late, vaguely, or defensively. Outside that group, you have plenty of other things to do, alone and unsupported.

Then panic strikes when you realize nothing will get done on time unless you throw on a cape and save the day. You care and want it to land, so you push harder while your resentment grows.

Control freak. Workhorse. Martyr. The labels you wear—and the ones others assign—stack up in a world where you’re constantly pushing past your edge.

Team efforts often start with a simple assumption: if I do my part, and you do yours, the result will take care of itself. But that's rarely what happens. We're different people, with different tolerances, rhythms, and blind spots. Buried underneath our human shell, we might as well be beings from other galaxies.

Your best and their best don't always match; what feels like a 10 to you might be a 5 to them. No one talks about the quiet distortions that emerge when effort isn't aligned. It’s the trap of perfectionists, overachievers, or those who want to do good work. But in systems of people, uncalibrated effort creates noise, not excellence.

One person overdelivers on a proposal no one reads. Another builds a feature the client didn't ask for. A team preps for a launch that gets delayed by three months. The intention was good, but the goal was unclear, and the effort wasn't tuned. They gave more than the system needed because they didn't know what it needed.

If individuals don't know what the whole is—don't see the system, don't understand the goal, or know where the interdependencies are—their choices default to local logic. Lack of direction is a strategic gap and a systemic blind spot.

Doing what the system needs

We don't suffer from laziness, but from incoherence. We often over-function because we don't know what "enough" looks like. We give a 10 by default, not by design.

Coherence happens when everything fits fully aligned, not forced. It's not the loudest instrument in the symphony, but the harmony. What would you hear if every member of an orchestra played at their maximum volume and speed? A chasm? A mess? A boxing match?

Most managers are trained to think in targets, who delivered, and who's behind. The assumption is that the team will be high-performing if everyone performs at their best. But when each person pushes to their limit, it often creates friction. One moves too fast, another throws off the rhythm, and a third locks their piece so tightly that the next part can't move.

Coherence asks a different question: What does the team need right now? That might mean asking someone to slow down so others don't fall apart, or asking someone to let go of doing their part "perfectly" to help another piece land. Fit matters more than force.

In systems thinking, this is called global optimization: tuning each part to serve the whole, even if that means doing less. But when each part gives its all without regard for what the whole needs, that's suboptimization.

When one team "delivers a 10" but another can only "handle a 6," the system misfires. Russell Ackoff, a pioneer in systems thinking, said it best: "The performance of a system depends on how the parts interact, not how they act taken separately."

Excellence means integration, not maximization. A Ferrari doesn't achieve greatness only by maxing out each part but tuning every part to the rest. In aircraft manufacturing, you crash if the wings outperform the control system.

The move isn't to perform harder but to ask, "What's right here?" Because in coherent systems, not everyone gives their max; they offer what fits.

A product team slows down to match a shaky go-to-market plan. A department pauses because dependencies aren't ready. A leader resists launching something brilliant because the system isn't prepared to receive it.

Fairness is understanding what the moment requires from each person; one may need to step forward because the timing fits, and another may need room to fall back, not out of weakness but alignment, because coherence is balance.

We often praise the person who "stepped up," stayed late, or saved the day, but heroism usually means something broke upstream. A risk wasn't flagged, a request wasn't made, and a hand wasn't raised. We keep rewarding the 10s, the high performers, the rockstars, the over-functioners. But something breaks if the team runs at a 6, and someone insists on 10.

What if leadership wasn't about pushing potential, but harmonizing contribution?

There's a reason the proverb endures: "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link." Strengthening the wrong part does nothing if the weakest one still breaks. We lead better when we stop confusing effort with alignment, resist the urge to overdeliver, and start listening to what the whole needs.

PAUSE. LEARN. MOVE ON.

This article was inspired by the genius and kindness of Fabrizio Favaretto, who taught me what it means to design for the system, and by my beloved friend Simona Curci, who sees systems as a whole, and beyond.

Traditional management assumes that if every part performs at its peak, the system will thrive, and excellence is the sum of high-performing individuals. But systems thinking tells a different story: over-performance in one part can clog, destabilize, or even break the whole if the rest isn't ready to receive it.

In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge reminds us that high-functioning systems aren’t built on heroic parts but tuned relationships. He saw learning organizations as living systems—held together not by rules or roles but by shared purpose, feedback, and trust. For Senge, coherence wasn’t just structural but cultural. A system learns not by forcing alignment but by cultivating it.

You can reach Stephen at stephen@alygn.company.