Early in my consulting work with government officials in Colorado, my supervisors introduced me to a scenario that has stayed with me ever since. Imagine a design team and an engineering team, both tasked with building a “strong” car, but never given a shared definition of what “strong” means. The engineers might optimize for a powerful, long-lasting engine. The designers might prioritize a body resistant to dents. Without alignment, two entirely different cars emerge from the same directive.
This lesson shaped how I approached every project that followed.
When working with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment to support rural entrepreneurs in adopting digital tools, my team made deliberate efforts to align with state officials on even the most fundamental questions: Who exactly are the entrepreneurs we’re serving? What qualifies as a “digital tool”? What does “rural Colorado” actually mean? These weren’t trivial questions; they were the foundation on which meaningful work could be built.
I carried that same mindset with me to Uttarakhand, where I currently work with SAHELI, an integrated program with initiatives supporting adolescent girls across the verticals of health, education, and livelihoods.
More than four months into my Fellowship, I arrived at the office on what seemed like an ordinary day. But something was different. My coworkers weren’t at their desks. Down the hall, I heard the low murmur of a conversation already in progress. When I opened the conference room door, I found every employee supporting SAHELI’s education vertical seated together, their attention fixed on someone I didn’t immediately recognize.
SAHELI runs an ambitious education initiative working with 28 government-intervention schools across Uttarakhand. Recognizing the complexity of supporting rural schools at that scale, the organization had hired a new manager to oversee the education vertical’s operations, and it was clear from the moment I sat down that significant changes were coming to the education vertical.
Over two days, I watched the new leadership do something deceptively simple but organizationally powerful: they listened. They asked school facilitators about their pain points, what was working, and what they believed could be improved. Then they clearly and deliberately shared the goals of SAHELI’s education initiative: Why the facilitators’ work matters, and how it connects to the organization’s broader mission.
That exchange surfaced something important about the nature of these disconnects. In my own time in the field, I had noticed that facilitators had quietly shifted away from the structured Microsoft suite curriculum they were expected to follow, developing their own approaches instead. It wasn’t an act of defiance — it was adaptation. But because no clear channel existed to surface that kind of information, leadership had no way of knowing, and facilitators had no way of getting the support they might have needed. The two days of open dialogue were precisely the kind of space where gaps like this could finally be named.
One moment stood out in particular: the new manager shared feedback from SAHELI’s donor, explaining the rationale behind upcoming changes. It was a small gesture with an outsized effect; it gave every person in the room a clearer sense of why their work was evolving, not just what was changing.
The impact of those two days has been visible ever since. Facilitators now send daily WhatsApp updates: where they went, what activities they conducted, how many students they reached, and photos documenting their work. What was once a time-consuming process of calling each facilitator individually to piece together success stories has become something that emerges organically from information shared every day. The gap between what’s happening on the ground and what leadership understands has narrowed significantly.
The “strong car” problem isn’t unique to product teams or consulting engagements. It lives in every organization where vision travels downward without feedback traveling upward, where workers execute without context and managers plan without ground truth. Closing that gap requires deliberate, ongoing communication in both directions.
As I continue my Fellowship and look ahead to the work that follows it, this remains one of the most important lessons I carry: before anything else, align the understanding.
