Gain Alignment
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify the key moments in the design process when alignment matters most.
- Describe ways to assess your starting point.
- Create the conditions for alignment.
Key Moments to Ensure Alignment
If you’ve ever heard someone make a case based on a premise you didn’t agree with, you’ve seen the importance of gaining alignment before moving on. For example, imagine someone claims that being in a specific market stall would drive sales, but you’re skeptical of that claim. If this person went on to pitch the best possible uses of that stall, you might think to yourself, “Hold on, I’m still not sure that stall is the key to driving sales.”
This type of thing happens a lot in product strategy, design, and innovation work. There might be a disconnect between the premise around what drives business outcomes, and the product design work that creates user experiences. That’s because there’s a layer of translation between the business-speak of outcomes, and the design-speak of customer needs and user experience.
One of the most important things strategy designers do is to ensure that your groups of stakeholders, decision-makers, and leaders agree on the premises on which your strategies are based. As a strategy design project moves through different phases of work, you’re moving the group from ambiguity to clarity of vision by building one premise on top of another.
But as you saw with the market stall example, you need to make sure that the group believes in the first premise before moving on to the next one. With that in mind, here are some key moments in the design process to ensure you have alignment before moving on.
- Challenge framing defines what success looks like. This happens before the Discover phase.
- Research insights serve as a foundation for customer-centered problem-solving. Alignment on research insights happens as the last step in the Discover phase.
- Opportunity area selection determines which strategic approach the project team should pursue. This milestone happens during the Define phase.
- Design direction selection is the milestone that determines what you design. It happens during the Design phase.
- Bringing an idea to market establishes how you activate extended and related teams to build, market, maintain, sell, and support the vision. While executing on the GTM plan may be ongoing, the alignment behind the plan happens during the Deliver phase.
When done well, strategy design is essentially saying, “If we all agree that success looks like this [challenge framing], and we’ve learned that our audiences need this [research insights], and the market opportunity is this [opportunity area], and our organizational strengths are these [research insights], then we believe in this [vision] as a good solution for us to build. And here’s our evidence or reasons to believe [prototypes].
Assess Your Starting Point
To create alignment with key stakeholders, it’s important to understand their motivations, goals, and feelings around a project. This means assessing stakeholders' interest in a project and how they influence it throughout the design process.
At any point during a project, you may have supporters, people who are neutral toward the work, and detractors.
- Supporters are excited to hear and talk about the project. They eagerly show up to meetings and work sessions, participate, and offer help. They’re committed and take action to move a project forward.
- Neutral individuals show up but don't prioritize the project. They may not engage as much, or they may show signs of being supporters in some instances and detractors in others. They may help if you ask, but typically won’t offer.
- Detractors work against project success, either in the open or behind the scenes. They may show up and bring a cynical stance to every new phase and activity. They find all the reasons why a vision won’t succeed but don't help solve problems they identify. They may be against change in general or just against this particular project.
To determine where people stand in relation to the categories above, you:
- Refer to internal research. Review information you collected during the initial project research around your stakeholders’ interests, goals, and motivations for the work. To learn more about this process, check out the Research for Strategy Design module in Resources.
- Have 1:1 conversations. For any questions that remain after research, get to know individual key stakeholders in casual conversation to uncover their attitudes, thoughts, and concerns.
- Use ecosystem mapping. Ecosystem mapping is a process used to capture all the key teams and individuals that influence a project—to manage internal stakeholder relationships throughout a design project. Check out the Design as a Social Practice module in Resources to learn more.
Create the Conditions
Along with assessing your starting point, it’s also important to understand how to create the right conditions for alignment to occur.
Alignment is a craft. Strategy designers have developed various tools and methods to achieve it, and you gain a deeper understanding of these later in the module. A majority of these tools and methods bring groups of people to alignment by creating conditions for it in one of these ways.
A Shared Experience
Experience leads to understanding, and a shared experience can help people empathize with a challenge and create more understanding about it. Shared experiences might look like workshop activities, analogous research, or field observations.
A Shared Understanding
Shared understanding is needed to ensure that a group accepts the premise you’re building your strategy on. If you have trouble reaching a shared understanding, try using both quantitative and qualitative methods to get people there. Also, be open to the idea that you may be wrong, and more or different investigations might persuade you.
Compassion for the Challenge and Audience
If the group feels disconnected from the challenge at hand or has trouble seeing the customer’s perspective, building compassion can help them feel more invested in finding solutions and meeting needs. Compassion also lets people connect to their intrinsic problem-solving skills.
Collaborative Problem-Solving
People believe in what they help build. So involving stakeholders in collaborative problem-solving activities leads to a more nuanced understanding of constraints and increased buy-in from stakeholders.
Visible Friction and Conflict Resolution
When you bring together diverse groups, you can expect to uncover friction and conflict. In this situation, the strategy designer's job is to get to the heart of the difference in perspective or opinion, as long as it’s not a personality conflict.
Assume that each stakeholder actually represents a population, and their concerns are felt broadly outside of your project team. Dig into the reasons behind conflict to expose the nuance behind disagreements, unearth new constraints, and build compassion for other perspectives. That’s often enough of a basis to start collaborative problem-solving—you learn that it can’t be option A or option B, and begin to create new options together.
Interpretation by Others
To help people feel ownership over an idea or premise, work with them to put it into their own words and context. Thinking about how to connect the dots, and the different ways a phenomena manifests, can create deep understanding in the thinker. This also exposes you, the strategy designer, to new ways to talk about the topic, to make it accessible to different audiences.
Now that you know how to get alignment, it’s time to learn about methods to build shared understanding and align your core team.