Everyone agreed the program was on track

The most dangerous meeting in any cohort is the one where everyone says things are going well.

Six weeks since the last issue. I've been heads-down on a client project, and something from that work keeps coming back to me.

Halfway through the cohort, the mid-year check-in is smooth. The program manager says it's on track. The sponsor says it's on track. The board rep says it's on track.

Three people. Three definitions of "on track."

What's actually happened is that everyone has been successfully running three different programs in parallel — and nobody's noticed because nothing has gone wrong yet. When something does, you get three different definitions of "what went wrong" in the same meeting, from the same people who said everything was fine.

I watched a version of this play out last week. Four of us on a prep call for a board presentation. We spent forty minutes aligning on what to put on slide three. Not the data. The title.

Each person's instinct for that title pointed at a different audience. The government funder's version was about the mandate. The commercial partner's version was about market opportunity. The regional authority's version was about the infrastructure timeline. We found a title everyone could live with — which is not the same as finding a title that's true for everyone.

That conversation is going to need to happen again. At some point it's going to need to actually resolve.

Here's what I'd suggest doing before your next stakeholder check-in: write down what each person in the room would say if asked, *"What would this program need to achieve for you to call it a success?"* Don't ask them yet. Just write it down yourself. When the answers don't match — and they won't — that's the conversation to have now, not in October when something's gone sideways and everyone's pointing in different directions.

The alignment problem is already running in your program. The question is whether you surface it on purpose or wait for it to surface itself.