The RANGE Framework, by Jon Peck, founder of RANGE Hospitality Advisory.Align: close the gap between intent and the shift that runs Tuesday lunch.

Does everyone agree on the problem, and on what done looks like? Recognize produced a diagnosis. Align makes it the diagnosis: the one ownership and operations both sign, before a dollar goes to fixing it.

The gap that matters most in a growing group runs between what leadership intends and what happens on a Tuesday lunch shift when nobody senior is in the building. The cause is rarely the people. It is usually structure: priorities that were never made clear to the people running the shift, or the processes and accountability that should carry those priorities, never built.

Align is a structure, not a meeting. It produces four things a group can point to.

• One diagnosis, read together. Ownership and operations in the same room with the same findings, arguing about them once instead of separately for months.
• A definition of done. The scope, the outcome and the sequence, agreed in writing before the work begins, with the number that says it worked.
• Decision rights. Where the operator decides, where they recommend and where the call stays with the owner, so the first disagreement already has an answer.
• A path back for bad news. A problem a shift lead catches at 7:40 reaches someone who can act on it that night, not in next month’s P&L review.

For a brand, Align also means the concept itself is written down, including what it refuses. A concept that only lives in the founder’s head loses every argument to people behaving reasonably on a busy night.

Whether a team is aligned shows up the moment something breaks during service. Ask it as three questions.

If the answer runs from the shift lead at 7:40 to ownership at next month’s review, the standard was probably never the problem. The signal had no path back to someone who could act on it. Decisions behave the same way: when the intent behind them lives in one head, every one of them climbs back up to that head.

The work still gets done, in two directions at once. The managers execute the plan they were handed, ownership measures the plan it had in mind, and both are right about what they see. Every review after that is a disagreement about which plan was the real one.

One agreed problem, a written definition of done and a clear line on who decides. Narrow can only say no to most of the list when everyone has already said yes to the same thing.