Example: Getting a Post-Merger Leadership Team to Actually Agree
A specialty insurance brokerage's leadership team, freshly merged from two firms, agreed in every meeting and reverted to old habits within a week. Structured alignment sessions surfaced the real disagreement and built a decision framework that held.
Six months after two specialty insurance brokerages merged, their combined leadership team could describe their shared strategy fluently in a meeting and then run two entirely separate planning processes the moment the meeting ended.
Background
The two firms, both specialty brokerages serving similar commercial insurance niches, had merged to build combined scale and cross-sell into each other’s client relationships. On paper, the merger made obvious sense and the combined leadership team, drawn roughly evenly from both legacy organizations, agreed enthusiastically in every strategy session about shared priorities, integrated planning, and a single go-to-market approach.
Polite agreement, quiet reversal
The gap showed up almost immediately in execution. Each legacy team kept running its own underwriting review process, its own client planning cadence, and its own definition of what counted as a qualified cross-sell opportunity, each slightly different from the other’s, neither formally documented as the new standard. Six months in, the two sides were still operating as two separate businesses that happened to share a logo, and every joint planning meeting produced warm agreement that somehow failed to survive contact with either team’s actual Monday morning routine.
Surfacing the disagreement nobody wanted to own
Rather than running another round of abstract strategy discussion, which had already produced six months of pleasant agreement with no behavior change, we built working sessions around specific, concrete upcoming decisions: a real underwriting case, a real cross-sell opportunity, walking each legacy team through exactly how they would handle it using their own inherited process. Placing both answers side by side in the room, rather than discussing the merger in the abstract, made a real and previously unstated disagreement visible for the first time: the two firms had fundamentally different risk tolerances baked into their underwriting habits, a difference nobody had wanted to name directly because it implied one side’s judgment was more conservative than the other’s.
A decision framework built to survive a hard week
Once the actual disagreement was on the table, the leadership team could negotiate it directly rather than avoid it, and we built a single underwriting decision framework specific enough that following either legacy process by default would be a visible, nameable deviation rather than an ambiguous judgment call. The framework also assigned explicit ownership for the client-planning cadence and cross-sell qualification criteria that had previously existed in two competing, undocumented versions.
Results
Within two months of the new framework taking effect, the two teams were running a single shared planning process for the first time since the merger closed six months earlier, and the leadership team reported that disagreements were now happening explicitly in the room, during the actual decision, rather than being avoided in the meeting and re-litigated quietly afterward through each side’s own process.
Questions
FAQ
Why does a leadership team agree in a meeting and then revert to old habits within days?
Because the agreement in the room was often polite rather than real. In a newly merged organization especially, people from each legacy firm tend to defer in the meeting rather than argue a point that might read as territorial, then quietly keep operating the way their old firm always had once they're back at their own desk, because that is the process they actually trust and know how to execute.
How do you surface disagreement that people are actively avoiding stating out loud?
Structured working sessions with specific, concrete scenarios rather than abstract discussion, asking each side to walk through exactly how they would handle a real upcoming decision using their legacy process, then putting both answers side by side in the room. Seeing the actual gap in black and white, rather than a vague sense that things felt different, made the disagreement something the team could finally discuss directly instead of avoiding.
What makes a decision framework survive a hard week, when the original agreement didn't?
A framework survives pressure when it specifies who decides what and under which circumstances clearly enough that reverting to an old habit is visibly a deviation, not an ambiguous judgment call. The original post-merger agreement was a shared sense of goodwill without that specificity, which meant that under real deadline pressure, defaulting to the process someone already knew by muscle memory was the path of least resistance, and nobody could point to a rule being broken.
Facing something similar?
Tell us what's going on and where it's stalling.