Each page answers one question, states the short answer first, and shows where it comes from. Written by Christoph Svoboda, author of The Hidden Cost of Speed. The book’s core terms are defined in the glossary.
A shared reference is the sufficiently common frame through which people across an organization interpret priorities, reality, meaning, trade-offs and the next sensible action.
Because alignment meetings measure agreement with words, not agreement in action: everyone nods, and each person nods to a different interpretation.
Not by asking people whether they agree with the strategy — opinion questions measure the willingness to affirm, not how people will act.
The hidden cost of speed is the slow decay of shared references that sets in when an organization optimizes everything for velocity: the faster it moves, the less time people spend confirming they still mean the same thing by the same words.
The practice–aspiration gap is the measured distance between how people in an organization actually operate and what the organization holds up as its intended way of operating.
The resulting failures are rarely errors of calculation — they are correct answers to different questions.
See it in your own answers. The Shared Reference Diagnostic — ten scenarios, about ten minutes, your own report, free.