Creating Organisational Alignment
Many myths circulating in organisations lead to practices that break down peoples’ abilities to gain alignment and work effectively across functional and team boundaries. Here are seven pillars for fostering effective alignment and strategic execution in organisation, and what tends to work against them.
1. Working to Realise the Whole Versus Polarasing
When we work from the perspective of the whole, we see forces that are already present in the current world and we also see those that are still only potential and waiting for development. We see in people what forces they currently hold, and we also see their potential and what they are striving to become. Thus we are aware of one set of forces on a material plane and another on a mental or essence plane. Our interactions are no longer based solely on the reconciliation of contradictions arising from current capability or current forces; we also seek to interact with others based on potential and becoming — both theirs and ours.
This kind of interaction is characterised by regard for what is not explicitly expressed and questions that invite everyone to see potential that is not apparent. It employs mental frameworks that reveal what is not yet actual. We are then prepared to see what others desire in order to improve their effectiveness in the world we share with them, as well as the on-going aims that we are developing in ourselves.
When we cannot hold this perspective, we enter the “World of Contradiction,” within which we are able to see only polarities. We experience restraining and activating forces as they relate to our thinking. As we initiate actions, we expect inevitable hurdles. We see what others are proposing as if it were contrary to our view. In fact, an awareness of the other force exists simultaneously in our own thinking, but nevertheless we perceive it as purely contradictory and therefore exclusive and opposing. Polarity or dualism emerges, causing all thinking to be characterised by pairs of mutually exclusive opposites. Two contradictory things cannot both be possible at the same time, and therefore one must determine the truth through a series of mutually excluding sequences of reasoning that rules out options at every step. Two people can not be right at the same time if they have different, opposing views.
Our interactions in this world tend to be argumentative and combative. Polemics are the course of the day; each debater seeks to be the winner, the one who is right. We try to prove our point by citing examples from history, drawing analogies, using the other person’s view against them, or relying on the persuasion of a higher authority. If we are not an effective debater, we frequently give up and go along with the more persuasive force. Nothing new is brought into existence. A rehashing of past arguments is replayed mechanically — or maybe even imaginatively. Groups govern themselves by seeking arbitration, consensus or compromise, or in some cases agreeing to disagree. This world view, rare in the Western world, also leads to efforts to avoid conflict or, when contradiction does emerge, to passive-aggressive behaviours.
2. Using Disciplined, Critical Thinking Versus Generating Endless Options
It is necessary to reflect on our aims in order to know what the proper approach is for thinking about possible actions to take. For example, if we need creativity, working in a linear model will probably not get us where we want to be; but if we need an action list, linearity is an excellent approach.
Most of us are aware that linearity belongs to the left brain and that the right and left brains function differently and work well in different situations. We are less likely to have learned that, in addition to the thinking modes of the different hemispheres, we can use different approaches and methods to generate thinking appropriate for different situations.
Brainstorming and mind mapping work well in some circumstances but in others can be insufficient to the task. Both are elemental, tactical tools that arise from deduction, focus on parts rather than wholes, and invite divergent and expansive thinking. We cannot rely on them for focused thinking or for consensus building and priority setting.
Within divergent thinking generally there are strategic and tactical approaches, as well as guidelines that help determine situations when these approaches are appropriate. For instance, there are times when we need to:
Develop incremental action plans with many elements on occasions when the reciprocity needed with our stakeholders has already been taken into account.
Produce change or a solution in one “part of the whole.”
Break down elemental aspects to progressively increased degrees of refinement in order to weed out variances at progressively greater levels of detail.
Create a sequential action plan.
Get people involved and encourage their contributions, using brainstorming or mind mapping as a side-bar to a work session.
Divergent thinking is not effective — alone, initially, or primarily — when:
The context of work is dynamic and we must take into consideration and manage many related stakeholders, players, or impacts.
There is a competitive consequence.
We need to keep an organization oriented in a particular direction within a rapidly changing context.
We wish to generate new, comprehensive thinking, rather than assemble a list of thoughts that people have already come up with.
We are managing competing egos in order to develop new thinking and gain alignment.
A framework is the form we give a thing in relation to its purpose, a useful mental instrument that enables us to think both elementally about parts and systemically about wholes. Disciplined, critical thinking based on the use of frameworks inevitably has beneficial consequences in terms of how we organise work. It is essential to maintaining focus and orientation and developing creativity.
We use frameworks to think about phenomena and organise experiences by parceling them into units that give them shape and make them comprehensible. For example, this morning I engaged in several activities. I got up, ate, sat down at my desk, and wrote several paragraphs. Each of these activities can be viewed as a system with a distinctive purpose. Although I engaged in hundreds more actions at a much more detailed level, the form my mind gave to the morning’s experience is the list or sequence of these four activities.
Our minds always use more or less sophisticated frameworks to give form to experience, although we are mostly not aware of them. When we examine the process, we notice ourselves “chunking” things into systemic wholes, each whole serving different purposes. In the example of my morning, there is a system of actions and objects related to getting up; another relating to eating breakfast; a third related to arriving at my desk ready to work; and a fourth to thinking and writing. We give a form to each that includes a distinctive purpose, product, process, and capability.
Everyone develops and operates within personal frameworks, and it is often difficult to get enough distance from them to become conscious of the ways we use them. We need frameworks in order to operate as organised wholes, and we need the consciousness and understanding that they bring. However, they can easily become so deeply ingrained that we become reactive when someone transgresses against one of our own or one we have developed with a peer group.
The conscious, disciplined use of frameworks enlivens group processes, such as meetings, by revealing relationships between the different elements under consideration and enabling creative thought and questioning. Conducting a meeting by framework results in singularity: all of the people involved experience themselves as the integrated parts of one dynamic whole. Far from being reduced to sameness — the likely consequence of merely getting along — each distinctive, individual self is part of a unique and creative business whole. The word singular describes this phenomenon or names a systems view of it.
3. Seeking Higher Levels of Existence Versus Defending and Recovering the Current Level
Operating at a conscious level of energy includes the recognition that every organisation and person has a unique identity, one that is consistent with their essence or vision. It also includes the recognition that existence is stratified and that persons and organisations seek to reach higher strata or higher orders of existence. A child grows from Little Leaguer, to college athlete, to professional baseball player. Generally speaking, as responsible beings we seek to continually perform functions and provide products that are patterns for higher orders of existence. We seek ideas and solutions good enough to produce harmony. We see ourselves as instruments to provide better futures for our families, businesses, communities, ecosystems, and governments — the living wholes in which we experience ourselves as essential parts.
We can structure our organisations to achieve beyond current their current limits. Intrinsically, people experience this way of doing business as a requirement for them to seek greater understanding and higher orders of character. Extrinsically, they see it as a requirement to be creative and responsible — to develop the ability to generate images of what can be operationalised in the effort to raise the level of existence in everything that their work affects.
Responsible leaders ensure that all work produces something of higher value and provide all members of their organisations with the ability to engage in meaningful work. They relate to people and events with equanimity and receptivity. They develop the character and the will to make a difference for the future.
4. Discovering Uniqueness Versus Assessing and Assigning Ownership
Essence is the basic inner quality that gives a thing or person their distinctive and unique character. The essence of the honeysuckle I am standing next to is its strong, sweet, distinctive smell. The essence of the wine I am drinking is the rich variety of pleasing taste sensations that it creates as I sip it. The term essence is used to characterise our experience of something. In reality, essence is that which produces the experience.
Each and every one of us possesses a unique essence. This is the enduring aspect of a person that becomes increasingly manifested as she or he grows and develops individuality over the course of a lifetime. It can be restrained, hidden, or squashed over by the demeanours that most of us learn to adopt in order to conform within social situations. Too much conforming will eventually cause a person to experience “loss of self” — to feel more like an intelligent computer than a living being.
When we become part of an energy rich and creatively oriented environment our essence emerges. We are then in a position to fully realise ourselves as persons and achieve the potential to evolve that is an inherent aspect of our being.
On the other hand, external assessment via feedback, performance reviews, and categorical systems like personality tests diminishes our ability to evolve ourselves and what we offer to the organisation as a whole. Metrics assigned by leaders to evaluate performance represent an assignment of ownership for a limited measure of the outcomes we are responsible for, rather than the natural sense of ownership that arises when acting from an understanding of essence.
5. Working from a Systems Approach versus Breaking Wholes into Parts
Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression…. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participant is completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the…cosmos.
We begin to realise that our universe is in a sense brought into being by the participation of those involved in it. It is a dance, for participation is its organising principle. This is the important new concept of quantum mechanics.
— Lyall Watson, Biologist
Imagine placing a highly concentrated red dye in a small stream and watching it flow into a larger stream and into a river and finally into a lake. There, though greatly diluted, it permeates the entire lake and all inhabitants of the lake now live in a delicately pink world. Furthermore, the lake remains colour-tinged for a very long time after the original, distant stream is cleared of dye.
Scientific theories are models of reality that work much the same way in societies as dye does in water. By the time they have permeated the societal “lake” they colour every aspect of how people think, the decisions they make, and the actions they take. Yet people are usually no more aware of this influence than a fish in the lake is aware of the dye. The more comprehensive the model, the more pervasive its ultimate social influence.
Unlike the fish however, we humans can change the colour or perspective through which we view our world. This requires a conscious act of choice that begins with awareness of the current perspective and the ways it determines how we think about ourselves and the world, how we live, and how our future is unfolding.
A MECHANISTIC UNIVERSE
For several centuries, our Western culture has been dominated by a Cartesian or mechanistic model of reality. This model emerged out of the discoveries of the “Scientific Revolution” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It replaced the image of a living, organic, spirit-infused universe with the metaphor of universe as machine, in which mind and matter were viewed as wholly separate and independent. All the entities that composed the universe of matter, including living organisms, were thought of as machines composed of separate parts that functioned according to specific and predictable laws of physics and chemistry.
In a world made up of machines, intelligence was the sole preserve of God and/or humans and the different parts that made up nature were ours to arrange and rearrange however we liked in order to serve our ends. Sixty years ago Aldo Leopold described the approach to Earth that had grown out of this model. “We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam shovel,” he wrote, “and we are proud of our yardage.”
A CHANGING PICTURE OF REALITY
Evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris writes that “Western science is very rapidly changing toward an understanding of nature as alive, self-organising, intelligent, conscious or sentient and participatory at all levels. In this newer framework, biological evolution is holistic, intelligent and purposeful.” The new ecological model Sahtouris describes makes understanding life central to understanding the nature of the universe. The following are a few of the many key discoveries of this changing science:
Living systems replace inert building blocks. A universal property of all life is the tendency to form multi-leveled structures consisting of living systems within living systems. Cells combine to form tissues, tissues to form organs, organs to form organisms that combine to form societies or ecosystems. Each of these systems is an integrated whole whose essential properties derive from the distinctive pattern into which its parts are organised; at the same time, each whole system is a part of a larger system.
A frog obtains its “frogness,” or its essential nature, from the characteristic way in which its “parts” interact with and are dependent on each other. This is distinct from the essential nature of a tree or a cell, as well as from the part the frog plays in the larger ecosystem that surrounds it. At the same time, the properties of the frog’s parts can only be understood within the context of the frog as a whole.
In other words, we cannot understand living systems by reducing them to their “basic building blocks” and analysing the parts. Indeed, when we dissect a living thing, physically or mentally, we destroy the systemic properties that make up it its essential identity. Because systems are fundamental to the way life structures itself, we can understand neither life nor the living nature of our world except as whole systems of integrated parts — parts that are themselves whole systems of integrated parts, down to the smallest particles we are able to perceive.
The web of life — from machine to network. A second key aspect of the ecological model is its replacement of the metaphor of machine with the metaphor of networks. Living creatures are members of ecosystem communities, linked together in a network fashion. At the same time, each organism is also a complex ecosystem in itself, consisting of a host of smaller organisms also linked in a network — a network of networks. Thus the network is the underlying pattern of all life and, in effect, interlinked networks form the vast “web of life.”
Within this web, reciprocal relationship replaces dominance as the model for our relationship to nature. Humans are neither dominant over nor subservient to nature. Instead, we are one of many nodes in a vast, living network, fundamentally interconnected and interdependent with all the other components. As Sahtouris notes, “The best life insurance for any species in an ecosystem is to contribute usefully to sustaining the lives of other species, a lesson we are only beginning to learn as humans.”
Reuniting Mind and Nature. In the systems model, all of an organisation is mindful and intelligent, and evolution is purposeful. The network connecting and composing living systems is not a collection of static components; rather it is a dynamic network of life processes through which each component and the network as a whole are continually “making themselves.” Through sophisticated feedback processes (to be distinguished from the kind used in mechanical and human systems), each living system and each network of living systems is capable of regulating itself, learning from its mistakes, and reorganising itself. In a manner of speaking, it has its own mind, which expresses itself through the process of self-organisation or autopoiesis.
Evolution enables a living system to express its inherent potential as an increasingly generative and value-adding member of the web of life. It is, as Lyall Watson notes, a creative dance, always bringing new structures, new behaviours, and new life into being, but never losing the basic network pattern that organises the dance.
Dialoging with living systems — a new model for learning. Systems — living systems, in particular — are central to the developmental perspective. Understanding them is critical to developing beneficial relationships with the living systems that make up our world. We have become aware that when we dissect a system we destroy its systemic properties. In order to apprehend and study a particular system without destroying its essential holistic, nonlinear, and dynamic properties, we need a new model for learning.
Living systems are in a constant process of becoming, literally creating and recreating themselves minute by minute through an ongoing “dialogue” between their pattern, structure, processes, and context. These four dimensions provide a systemic framework from which we can construct in our mind dynamic images of the self-creating processes of the systems we seek to engage.
6. Enabling Self-Accountability versus Proceduralising Everything
Accountability represents the ability all people have, separately and collectively, to tenaciously and courageously account for results throughout the duration of a process and for the ways these results support the process’s ultimate purpose. Both extrinsic and intrinsic self-management practices are critical to the practice of accountability. They are two ends of the same stick, working back and forth to build motivation for sustaining and renewing will.
When we do not build this nature of accountability into our organisation, we tend to proceduralise all activities and tasks. Procedures hold people accountable for carrying out proscribed tasks or activities to which they have no personal commitment in the service of ends that have not been fully articulated or understood.
EXTINSIC PROCESSES
Extrinsic processes speak to that which we must include in the work from the world outside ourselves; they guide us in accounting for our outputs and actions. When shared by all members of a working group, they may be used to reconcile internal differences and conflicts by using the greater whole to which we are all jointly committed as the reference point for deciding what is appropriate. Most importantly, they anchor each person to their own individual accountability.
Understanding. To be fully accountable, we must be connected by a deep understanding to events and situations as they unfold. Understanding gives us the ability to determine the highest leverage approaches from which to ensure the highest return on energy expended. It comes from engaging with the different wholes relevant to the situation and with all of the activating, restraining, and reconciling forces that are present and needed. A deep understanding allows us to truly see the situation as it is and not as we imagine it to be.
Solving and Inventing. Accountability also requires us to develop a value-adding process view of our work and the work of the units and businesses we are parts of. When we work from an encompassing view, we connect to the effects and effectiveness that our customers count on us to realise, that for which we are ultimately responsible. We are able to clarify problems that need solving and know where invention is needed to get the desired effect and effectiveness from every action along the way.
INTRINSIC PROCESSES
Intrinsic processes guide personal self-development and the inner work required to become able to be accountable.
Ownership. The first of these processes is use of the inner compass or source of direction needed to maintain and regenerate accountability in the face of shortfalls, failures, and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. To be responsible, we must build ownership for immediate outcomes and — beyond these — for ongoing stewardship in service to the purposes and achievements of the greater wholes of which we are parts. To develop an unwavering internal compass, a source of personal will and motivation, we connect ourselves to the value of the task or effort in service to the greater whole; the opportunity to further develop and exhibit purposeful behaviour; and a belief in the open-ended possibilities for learning and creating, and for discovering workable ideas.
Execution. Intrinsic accountability also develops from our ability to execute in a dynamic and evolving environment. In a successful business, we are most often pursuing moving targets with interceding forces that can cause us to lose personal force and power. Good guidance comes from coupling external objectives with internal personal aims and developing external strategies in order to position our efforts and use timing to good advantage.
DEVELOPING THE PROCESSES
The Execution Plan. Guidance also comes from developing and following an execution plan designed with reference points and milestones that tell us how we are proceeding, both intrinsically and extrinsically. External design is based on complementary and leveraged sets of steps. Internal design is based on the development path we are taking to move ourselves toward more appropriate ways of working in specific arenas of our lives.
An execution plan enables us to predict derailing forces and events, and to develop new strategies and solutions around, over, and under potential sidetracks. With other intrinsic processes it guides us as we develop the ability to rise above restraints, shortfalls, failures, and obstacles and develop the mental states required to achieve the ends for which we hold ourselves accountable.
Ongoing Self-assessment. Together, the two intrinsic processes of accountability provide us with the means to stay on course and to stay the course, while the two external processes enliven our motivation through deep understanding and connections to the source of our will, the ability to contribute to the greater whole of which we are apart. To continue to develop our accountability we must frequently revisit all four processes as we reflect on our development and ability to produce outcomes. This ongoing self-assessment improves our judgment and reveals ways in which we may be over- or under-expending energy in particular arenas. It lets us know when we are getting it just about right.
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