How Deep is the Nod?
The difference between a team that nods and a team that moves.
They nodded. A year later, you found out the nod was all you got.
The agreement comes a little too quickly. Heads nod all around the table. You say something clever, and when people laugh you realise your 13-year-old would have rolled her eyes. The conversation moves on, and something in you wonders whether the C-suite has just agreed on something — or it only feels like they have.
The more senior the team, the less I trust the nod. It's the most over-trusted signal in the room: cheap to give, expensive to misread.
The problem is that the nod is binary. You give it or you don't. But the thing it stands for — alignment — is never binary. It has depth, texture, reservations, trade-offs that haven't found a voice yet. An executive who strongly disagrees will usually say so. I’m more concerned about the nods from the ones who could live with the decision, who believe it’s the right decision, while having doubts, competing priorities, a sense that this isn't really theirs to carry. From the front of the room, every nod looks the same. They contain completely different intentions to act, and you can't tell them apart.
In the moment, there’s no conflict to manage, no resistance to work through. Agreement is the path of least resistance, and the meeting takes it. Then the decision keeps landing back on the CEO. Priorities multiply instead of collapsing. Execution needs more reinforcement than it should. Each function optimises for its own pressures, and the whole thing needs constant steering to stay pointed in one direction. Eventually, agreement seems to be everywhere — and the organisation is moving, just not anywhere anyone would have chosen.
When MIT researchers asked top teams to name their company's own priorities, only about half the executives could — and one level down, barely a fifth of their direct reports. Agreement thins out fast on the way down.
A few years ago I started trying to take the nod apart.
The instrument is simple. A team names the few priorities that genuinely have to be won — the ones everything else depends on. Then, instead of asking "are we aligned?" and getting the inevitable nods, you ask people to answer, on a scale of one to ten, with dots on a flip chart. Three columns. How strongly do I agree this is a must-win? How clear am I on what this actually is? And how much do I personally own it? I turn the chart away while they place their dots; after the first few, no one can tell whose is whose. Then I turn it back around.
The team sees the pattern at once — where the dots converge, where they don't, where the outliers sit. A spread shows that people are seeing very different things in the same organization.
The outliers are always interesting — at the high end and the low end. Someone in the room often wants to average them, and you can understand the pull of it: a column of scattered dots resolved into "so we're about a six on ownership" feels tidy, even rigorous. It’s a comfortable way to avoid the real conversations. A dot at three and a dot at nine aren't a pair of sixes; they're two people who see this completely differently and haven't yet said why. The spread is the finding. Collapsing it back into one figure is the same move as the nod: the quickest way to avoid the discomfort and call yourselves aligned.
Once the spread is on the wall, it's almost impossible to leave alone. The questions start coming from the group — why is ownership so low on this one, who put the nine, what are we not saying about the third column — and the conversation moves into the battles themselves, one at a time. It stops being "do we agree" and becomes specific: what would actually have to be true for those threes to become sevens. Someone proposes a fix, and someone else asks the question that the chart has put in everyone's mouth: “If we did that, how far would it move the dots?” Sometimes a lot. More often a little, and the room keeps pushing, because a little isn't enough and now no one can pretend otherwise.
As the team leans in, sharing their thoughts on the pattern in front of them, the CEO often becomes quiet. They might sit back in their chair, after sitting forward in a braced, ready-to-intervene posture. They might stand and stroll toward the wall, leaning against it, listening intently. They look more like they’re absorbing, less like they’re watching for what needs correcting.
Something they have sensed for so long but couldn’t quite put into words is now seen and articulated by others. The chart takes it out of the CEO's intuition and puts it on the wall, where everyone is looking at the same thing at the same time. The CEO can stop carrying it alone.
Then, near the end, they might step in, offering a perspective that ties the pattern on the chart to something the business has been living through. The market they keep half-entering and half-leaving. The initiative that always needs one more push. The decision everyone remembers making and no one remembers committing to.
One CEO, animated and insistent whenever he set out to convince someone, went quiet once the chart was up — and when he finally spoke, near the end, it was a synthesis sharper than anything he'd argued his way to all day, and all of the senior executives in the room went still as they took it in. Another told the team he checked himself every morning for a spring in his step, and that right then, at the end of the exercise, he really felt it. He grinned, looking to me like he was about to show us his skip. A third, stern all morning, admitted almost before he could stop himself that he sometimes doubted they could win — and ended the retreat in warm laughter.
The question the chart puts in everyone's mouth — “How far would that move the dots?” — turns out to be portable. And it travels on its own.
Someone walks out of one of these sessions, and a week later, in an ordinary meeting with the people who report to them, catches themselves asking it — how much do you agree with this, from one to ten? and then, before the number can settle, what would make it a ten? No flip chart, no cover. Just the question. The scale does the hard part for them. They've stopped trusting the nod, and found the smallest question that gets underneath it.
The chart stays in the room. What leaves with them is the habit of seeing a nod and wondering, "How deep is that nod?"
Reference
Donald Sull, Stefano Turconi, and Charles Sull, "No One Knows Your Strategy — Not Even Your Top Leaders," MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/no-one-knows-your-strategy-not-even-your-top-leaders/