In today’s organisations, alignment is an increasingly important factor in corporate life. While eventual alignment is worthwhile – as a way of making progress – it’s the way its achieved is the problem. Some may have heard of Amazon’s “disagree and commit” phrase/method. As an aside I’m toldby those with experience of the Amazon’s methods – its far less clear cut than portrayed.

The way in which real progress is made is by challenging something – whatever that thing is. It might be technology, a point of view or a business process. The challenge needs to play out, hopefully by peaceful means. Then agreement is made to move forward. Amazon folk have written about the need to ’disagree and commit‘. You may not always like the outcome, but you get on with it anyway. 

When the need for alignment is greater than the need for good and useful progress is where the wheels come off this approach

What happens In this case is the need for alignment in the eyes of senior leaders usurps the actual progress that could be made. When you have multiple teams working in a common problem space – this issue multiplies; as the need to be seen to be working collaboratively (and therefore ‘aligned’) is greater than the value of the outcome.

Take this humours tweet from the excellent Consulting Humor Twitter feed:

While funny, this depicts what’s so bad in this aspect of corporate life.

You may be thinking, where is the “so what” of this? Well, in my experience the outcome is a lack of progress, a mealy mouthed approach to change because being aligned to the lowest common denominator is more valuable than being bold, proposing radical new ways, and generally making people sit up and think differently.

 …and people wonder why our organisations and economies are broken…