How do I align executives with competing agendas?

You can get executives aligned, but at that level the agendas underneath are real and competing, and navigating them is genuinely hard. These are people with their own goals, pressures, and history. Feeling the difficulty is not a weakness; it is you accurately reading a hard room. The mistake is to treat competing agendas as obstacles to overcome, when they are actually the information you need. Each executive is protecting something that matters to them. If you understand what that is, you can often find the version of your direction that serves several of those things at once. Alignment at the top is less about winning and more about weaving. Before your next push, map what each key executive actually cares about, privately, and look for where those interests overlap with yours. Building your proposal on that overlap, rather than arguing people out of their positions, is how alignment holds when the agendas are strong.