Everyone Agreed. So Why Did Everyone Do Something Different? The team appears decisive while different interpretations accumulate beneath the surface.
The meeting ends with a clear decision:
make the client experience more exclusive.
Everyone agrees.
Retail starts developing a more personalised service.
Marketing proposes more selective access.
Operations redesigns appointments to give each client more time.
Three reasonable responses. Three different interpretations.
This illustrative scenario could occur in any maison. The misunderstanding becomes visible when the plans collide, although it began much earlier:
inside a word everyone thought they understood.
Exclusive.
When information travels but meaning does not
Teams often take agreement as evidence of alignment.
A nod. A familiar expression. No objections.
Yet “ready”, “urgent”, “quality” and “client first” can carry different meanings across functions.
A collection may be ready for presentation while still requiring production work.
A delivery date may be understood as a commitment by one department and a provisional target by another.
People then act on their understanding, turning an unexamined difference into decisions, schedules and promises.
A real case shows how consequential an unchecked difference can become.
A misunderstanding that reached Mars
In September 1999, NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter.
The investigation identified a mismatch in units:
a ground software file supplied data in English units, while the trajectory calculations required metric units. The discrepancy affected the calculated trajectory and led to the loss of the spacecraft.
NASA also highlighted the failure of its engineering and checking processes to recognise and correct the error.
The organisational lesson lies in the handover.
Data passed between teams without the incompatibility being detected.
For a business leader, this raises three questions:
What does the receiving team believe it has received?
What did the sending team actually provide?
Where is that understanding checked before someone acts on it?
The stakes in a maison are different. The need to verify assumptions across functions remains.
The value of a small interruption
Research on teamwork offers a useful lens:
conversational repair.
This describes how people identify and resolve problems in speaking, hearing or understanding.
In a study published in BMJ Open, researchers analysed communication in teams working in hybrid operating rooms.
They observed how conversational repairs helped establish joint understanding and address potential miscommunication.
Consider an ordinary exchange:
“We need this ready for Friday.”
“Ready for the internal review, or ready to send to the client?”
That question exposes two possible meanings before they become two different courses of action.
It takes a few seconds. Resolving the consequences later may take considerably longer.
Who is allowed to question apparent agreement?
From a systemic perspective, the most revealing moment is the team’s response to that interruption.
Does someone clarify the request?
Does the leader become impatient?
Does the person asking feel obliged to explain why they did not understand?
These responses teach people what they can safely bring into the conversation.
When clarification repeatedly attracts irritation, uncertainty may remain private.
When quick agreement receives approval, people may learn to move forward before checking what
they have agreed to.
Ambiguity can then become an organisational habit.
The team appears decisive while different interpretations accumulate beneath the surface.
The problem becomes visible later, often as friction between departments.
Each side can point to a reasonable decision.
Each side believes the other has failed to deliver.
The original gap in understanding is harder to see by then.
A leadership practice worth examining
Leaders influence whether these gaps become visible early.
Their response to “I’m not sure I understand” shapes the likelihood that someone will say it again.
Before closing an important discussion, a useful question is:
“What will each of us do as a result of this decision?”
The answers make interpretation observable.
A second question brings the dependencies into view:
“What needs to be clear to the other teams for your part to work?”
This matters particularly in Fashion & Luxury, where creative, commercial, production and service teams contribute different forms of expertise to one client experience.
Their differences are valuable. The organisation needs ways to connect them.
The executive and systemic coaching lens
Executive coaching can help a leader examine what happens internally when someone challenges
apparent clarity.
Do they experience the question as useful information, a delay, or a challenge to their authority?
What does their response make possible for the team?
Systemic coaching can extend this exploration to the relationships between functions:
where assumptions are checked, where questions become difficult, and where responsibility for clarification falls between roles.
A recent decision provides a concrete starting point.
What was said?
What did each person understand?
What action followed?
At which moment could the difference have been noticed?
This makes the pattern available for examination and change.
The business cost of an unasked question
Unchecked differences in understanding can contribute to rework, conflicting commitments, delays and inconsistent client experiences.
Teams can track these outcomes when they introduce clearer handovers and ways to verify important decisions.
The business value needs to be measured in context.
Clarification has an immediate, visible cost:
it takes time.
The cost of a misunderstanding often appears later, distributed across people, departments and clients.
A team’s effectiveness therefore deserves to be examined in the moments when agreement is interrupted.
Who notices the gap?
Who can name it?
What happens next?
How much does it cost, in your team, to say “I’m not sure I understand”?
And how much does it cost to stay silent?
#TeamEffectiveness #Leadership #SystemicCoaching #ExecutiveCoaching #OrganisationalCulture #CrossFunctionalCollaboration #FashionAndLuxury #SystemicTextures
Sources
NASA/JPL — Mars Climate Orbiter Team Finds Likely Cause of Loss: discrepanza tra unità di misura e mancata individuazione dell’errore nei passaggi tra team. www.jpl.nasa.gov
NASA — Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board: Phase I Report: causa tecnica identificata dall’indagine. llis.nasa.gov
Ivarsson & Åberg (2020) — Role of requests and communication breakdowns in the coordination of teamwork, BMJ Open: studio osservazionale sulle riparazioni conversazionali nei team chirurgici. L’applicazione alle maison è una lettura organizzativa, non un risultato testato dallo studio.
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