Alignment Cubed
Executive Team Alignment for growing companies. Most leadership teams believe they agree on what they're building. We help them find out, choose it together, and bring everyone else with them.
Who we are
Alignment Cubed is an Executive Team Alignment practice founded by Jonathan Pearce and Majid Islam. Between us, we have spent more than forty-five years inside organisations ranging from biotechnology start-ups to rapidly scaling companies, substantial operating sites and global businesses.
The problem we tackle
Strong organisations can run for a long time on shared context. As they grow, functions specialise, professional languages diverge, and capable leaders look at the same organisation through different lenses. The tension shows up as practical questions. How much process do we need? Who should make this decision? Why are we having the same strategic conversation again? Upstream of all of them sits a question most leadership teams have never answered out loud: WHAT are we actually trying to build? Each leader carries their own answer. From the inside, this rarely feels like disagreement. It feels like alignment. We call it False Clarity™.
How we help
We give CEOs and their executive teams a shared lens for seeing the organisation and a shared language for discussing what they see, so they can intentionally shape what they are building together. Our work centres on organisational identity and draws on our Identity Game™, Working Genius and psychological safety scans. It starts with the executive team and extends to the wider organisation.
Who we work with
CEO or Founder-led, scaling organisations at an inflection point, where implicit alignment is no longer enough, typically between 20 and 120 people. Technology companies are a particularly strong fit, and we have worked across biotech, cleantech, nanotechnology, education and global health. Clients include Cambridge Cleantech, Cambridge Global Health Partnerships, Cambridge GaN Devices, Pipped and Tozaro. Our purpose is simple: helping good people succeed.
"We’ve been using all the concepts and practical tips you’ve given us to continue the discussions around the strategy with our teams. Your guidance accelerates the process. To give an example: our HR Consultant was asking me a series of questions in order to create our People Strategy. After five minutes of discussing, I just gave her the Organisational Context Page you created, to which she responded: ‘That’s everything I need’. In that moment, my mind went BOOM as I realised the true value of what you’ve done for us – and that’s the biggest compliment I could give anyone. What you did for the company far exceeded my expectations."
Products and services
Company Offsite Facilitation - World Cafe Methodology
For moments when the whole organisation, or a large part of it, needs to think together: a strategy launch, a period of growth or change, or bringing a newly agreed direction to life. Using the World Café method, small groups explore a few carefully chosen questions, move between tables to cross-pollinate ideas, and build a shared picture of what the organisation collectively thinks. We design the questions with you, facilitate the day and harvest the insights. People leave with a shared sense of ownership and forward looking vision of what can be. It is often how alignment travels between the executive team and the wider organisation. It is a launch pad for collective action.
Thinking and Talking Better Together
A psychological safety programme for teams, built around the Fearless Organization Scan, Amy Edmondson’s research and other seminal thinkers including Nancy Kline, Edgar Schein and William Isaac. The scan shows how safe people feel to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns and mistakes, and so whether different perspectives can be surfaced and challenged productively. A half-day facilitated debrief follows the scan in which team members explore as a group what should change for them to co-create the conditions for them to think and talk better together as a foundation for enhanced performance. Facilitated by Jonathan Pearce, certified Fearless Organization Scan practitioner.
Working Genius
From the leadership team to the whole organisation. Each person discovers the kinds of work that give them energy and the kinds that drain it; teams see how they complement one another; and the leadership team sees more clearly how ideas become action, and where they sometimes don't. Facilitated by a Certified Working Genius Facilitator.
CEO Alignment & Identity Sessions
Six private 90-minute conversations for a CEO. Each pairs a short introduction to one deeper organisational lens, from contingency thinking and systems thinking to organisational identity, with a longer conversation applying it directly to the decisions the CEO is carrying now: strategy, executive-team design, decision-making, culture and accountability. The aim is a shift in how you see the problem.
Strategic Identity Assessment (free)
A short online assessment for CEOs that shows the organisational identity your organisation is currently operating from, and what it might mean for how you lead and grow.
Executive Team Alignment
Deeper work with the CEO and executive team, built around three widening fields of awareness: see yourself, see each other, see the system. Through workshops, strategic conversation and individual debriefs, the team makes its assumptions about the organisation visible, develops a shared lens and language, and chooses deliberately what it is building. Where clients want it, we help carry that alignment through other leaders, teams and the wider organisation.
The Identity Game™
A facilitated, in-person, 90-minute strategic thinking session for your leadership team. It introduces four contrasting organisational identities that make different ways of organising easy to see, experience and discuss. You leave with a new lens on your organisation, a shared vocabulary for talking about it without it becoming personal. It is our front door: a practical way to experience organisational identity before deciding whether deeper work would be useful.
