Learn Why Alignment is Key

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Define alignment.
• Explain the benefits of achieving alignment throughout the design process.
• Describe the risks of not achieving alignment throughout the design process.
• Explain why it’s key to create top-down and bottom-up support.

Alignment Is Key

If you’ve completed other badges in the Learn Strategy Design trail, you’ve learned about some key concepts and steps involved from framing a design challenge to idea generation to prototyping. In this module, you learn more about alignment as it relates to strategy design—the practice of driving business outcomes with design tools and processes—including why it’s so important and how to achieve it. 

First, some context: No one creates a product or service from initial idea to market success alone. It happens within a system, where each person does their part. 

The system also includes other elements, like tools, machines, and spaces. These are the parts of the system that organizations put a lot of effort and intention into since they can see the immediate impact of their success or failure. When it comes to physical assets, organizations regularly consider questions like, “Do we have the right tools to enable employees to do their work?” and “Do we have the infrastructure set up to run the digital products and services we’re building?” It’s pretty straightforward to rectify any issues with those parts of the system. 

But consider all the roles different people play in the system—proposing, creating, designing, approving, building, deploying, supporting, and maintaining it. The people in the system are crucial to the success of any effort, and rectifying issues with them can be anything but straightforward.

Alignment, in a strategic design project, is about making sure that the people in the system are ready and willing to help your project be successful. 

You may wonder whether this is design work, or why a strategy designer does it as opposed to someone else on the team. To make a strategy design project successful, it's just as important to align your organization as it is to create a compelling and strong product, service, or experience. 

If you focus only on crafting the vision, you'll find it’s not likely to get to market. This is because you need partnerships across many different groups in your organization to bring a product to market. And to get that partnership, you need all those groups to understand why this work is important, why they should prioritize it, and how they can help make it real. Without alignment, even the best ideas and visions will languish on the proverbial shelf. 

Getting a group to align doesn’t happen by accident or all at once. It’s built over time by understanding the people you’re asking to participate in the success of your work and facilitating the shifts in mindset, perspective, and priorities necessary to get everyone to feel good about doing the work. It’s about helping people see the opportunity, inspiration, and potential of your work and how it impacts them and your customers or end-users.

What Do We Mean By "Align"?

You need alignment with different groups within an organization, but it won’t all be the same. Here’s a set of best practices in terms of the topics to align different groups on. 

The type of alignment work you need to do differs when you’re talking with an organization leader versus when you’re talking with a project team member, but you need alignment at both of those levels and everywhere in between. 

In the real context of your (or your client’s) organization, you want to customize your approach to alignment and the amount of attention you pay to it for each individual in leadership and on the project team. Maybe the chief marketing officer (CMO) cares deeply about the project and wants to know all the details of your approach, but the CIO is more interested in outcomes than processes? Maybe the C-level leaders in your organization only want to know that you’re taking on the strategic challenge you framed and when you’ll come back with a recommendation, and perhaps they’ve given authority to their direct reports to steer the work? 

Each organization operates differently based on the dynamics of the leadership team, the organizational culture, and the nature of the challenge you’re solving. The more specifically you can understand and meet the alignment needs in your organization, the more likely you are to set your project up for success. 

A Word on Executive Sponsors

Executive sponsors have the power to impact your design project, so it’s important to ensure they’re in alignment throughout the scope of a project. This means it's key to follow best practices when briefing them on project progress. 

Best practices for briefing sessions:

• Maintain a regular cadence of short check-in meetings.
• Establish the agenda ahead of time, including clear expectations and key questions to drive the conversation.
• Plan to spend more time listening than presenting to executives.
• Always be time-sensitive with meeting duration, virtual communications, and reporting.

Best practices for project updates:

• Ensure executive sponsors have the opportunity to hear recommendations before you present them to other stakeholders. Some executives may not want the pre-meeting, but many may take you up on the offer.
• Make research insights, concepts, and prototype feedback transparent and accessible.
• Invite executive sponsors to key milestones, like when the team presents findings from research and prototyping.
• Always share back insights, decisions, and next steps after meeting with executive sponsors to ensure understanding and alignment.
• Be confident and enthusiastic about what you present to executive sponsors. If you’re not confident about it, clearly frame what you’re sharing as early thinking and ask for input.

Benefits of Alignment

In addition to alignment being a fundamental key to bringing any product, service, or experience to market, it also helps you improve your ways of working and your outcomes. 

With alignment, you:

• Focus the project team’s efforts on what matters most.
• Drive outcomes more directly.
• Improve communication and teamwork.
• Improve efficiency, since people can act more independently in service of the common goals.
• Reduce the possibility of friction and stray from intent, especially at handoffs.
• Enable everyone to contribute their expertise in a way that supports the vision.
• Increase team satisfaction because members believe in what they’re doing and can see that others value it.
• Increase accountability, because when everyone shares goals, we can hold each other accountable.

Working toward a business outcome while simultaneously championing the end user's needs is a tricky balancing act. When you bring people along for the journey from ambiguity to clarity, you have the opportunity to improve both the work and the relationships!

What’s at Risk Without Alignment

We explored some benefits. Now, let's consider the other side of the coin. If you don't align stakeholders and makers throughout your design process, you risk: 

• Wasting time and energy on the wrong ideas and tasks.
• Inconclusive outcomes because success isn't well defined, you can never achieve clear success.
• Discord between stakeholders, which sometimes becomes discord between teams.
• The need to do re-work, including the need for additional investments in time and resources at a minimum.
• Resistance and lack of trust in the project team and in design overall.
• A lack of understanding of the importance and value of the work and the solution vision.
• Project failure or premature ending due to a lack of support or resources.
• Low morale among employees who can't point to successful contributions to the organization or feel misaligned with company values.

If you've ever worked on a project and experienced that "two steps forward and one step back" feeling, it's reasonable to assume that not everyone is fully aligned. That might be the moment to scan your ecosystem and make sure that you've aligned each group on the proper information. 

Sometimes, in trying to gain alignment, you may uncover an objection or question that changes your vision or plans. You may learn about a perspective or obstacle you didn’t know about before that changes your understanding of the right solution or path forward. Alignment is both about getting the people to agree on a solution or vision, and about shaping a vision or solution that people can agree on. It’s a give and take between individuals and the group. 

Top-Down, Bottom-Up

When management consultant and writer Peter Drucker coined the phrase "Culture eats strategy for breakfast," he was talking about alignment. He suggests that no matter how solid your strategic plan is, if your broader organization doesn’t share a belief in it, the plan's success will be limited. When it comes down to it, the people implementing the plan are the ones who make all the difference. So let's consider our stakeholders from multiple perspectives. 

Top-down support is formal. When you get top-down support, it unlocks budget, resources, and explicit permission to challenge the status quo. If the project requires room to experiment, top-down support gives you permission and space to do it, as senior leaders can use their political capital to protect and advocate for the work. 

What bottom-up support lacks in formal power, it makes up for in genuine inspiration. Bottom-up support describes the grassroots power people have to influence attitudes—people with a passion for the work, spreading the word about it by organic means and lending their skill to make it better. Bottom-up support often means the people carrying out the vision feel a sense of ownership of it.

With only top-down support, the vision can get diluted or stray from original intent as it is activated and experienced. People who build and deliver the vision might not have visibility into the rationale behind it, might be fragmented in their attempts to support it, or might encounter aspects that haven’t been defined. 

As a result, when they need to make a quick decision on what to do, such as a developer figuring out how they’ll build a feature without the benefit of nuanced insights on user priorities, they can negatively impact the user experience. Customers can feel this lack of alignment. They might complain that the experience feels incomplete, doesn't make sense, or feels inauthentic to the brand.   

With only bottom-up support, initiatives become "nights and weekends" work and never really get off the ground. They lack key elements or skills needed for success, and frustrate or burn out employees who are trying to make good things happen.

By taking the time to secure top-down support from leadership and key stakeholders, the strategy designer can get a project up and running, including the budget, time, and team commitments. And by generating bottom-up support, teams tap into their workforce's diverse perspectives and skills. It’s equally important to do both. 

So you’ve learned the why and when of alignment. Now it’s time for the how. In the next unit, explore best practices to help you achieve organizational alignment across your organization.