Alignment is Overrated

Alignment is not the end all, be all that we chalk it up to be.

This week I’m making the case that alignment is overrated, and commitment is the mindset that makes all the difference to execution. We’ve got a couple articles that really dig into the psychology of it all, but don’t worry, they’re not too science-y. We’ve also got a fascinating article on the absolute wonders of technology that have become mundane in our daily lives.

Cheers,
Kevin

I think alignment is overrated.

We talk a lot about “getting aligned” in the business world.

But when we’re talking about the future, like we are with strategy, it’s almost impossible for everybody to completely agree on the future at a detailed level. The future is unknown. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we can’t be 100% sure.

So 100% alignment is a silly goal that’s just going to set us up for failure.

What we really need is commitment. We need to get past asking, “Will this work?” and get started on asking, “How are we going to make this work?”

Alignment = I agree with this direction.
Commitment = I will do everything I can to make this direction succeed.

Rick Vanzura ran into this at Freight Farms, the agricultural tech company where he was CEO. The team was shifting focus from small customers to bigger institutional accounts, and Rick did the co-creation work right. Instead of handing the strategy down from the top, he ran working sessions where his managers helped shape it. Most of the team got there. They understood the logic, saw their own fingerprints on the plan, and were ready to move.

One leader wasn’t. And by that point it wasn’t really about the strategy anymore. The plan had already been debated, refined, and decided with his input built in. He kept pushing back anyway. Rick called it directly: “Everyone needs to be rowing in the same direction. In challenging times, full commitment is nonnegotiable.”

That’s the line I’d draw, too. Debate is critical before the decision gets made. Once it’s made, still arguing against it just taxes everyone else trying to execute. People got a say. Now they have to get on board.

Before the decision, dissent makes the strategy better. After the decision, commitment gives it a better chance of succeeding.

This has been a guiding principle of mine for years, mostly because full agreement on anything that hasn’t happened yet is close to impossible. Everyone has their own read on how you’ll get there. So instead of chasing 100 percent agreement, I aim for 70 percent aligned across everyone involved, then ask for 100 percent commitment.

That 70 percent isn’t a vote count. It’s not seven people saying yes while three grumble on their way out. It’s a floor for each individual person. If you asked everyone privately to rate the plan 1 to 10, you want every single answer at a seven or better. If someone’s sitting at a four, chances are good other people probably share the concern and haven’t said so yet. Surface it and deal with it before you move on.

Getting everyone to a seven still isn’t the finish line, though. A group of sevens thinks the plan is decent. Defending it when things go sideways takes more than that. For that you need an actual act of commitment. I think it helps to make people say it out loud, or even write it down. “I’m in” means more when someone had to actually say it, and it gives you something to point back to later when doubts creep back in.

The goal is to have every leader willing to execute the decision as though it were their own.

If something’s breaking in execution, a committed team should be the first to raise it. What commitment ends is reopening whether the decision was right every time the plan hits a rough patch.

There’s an important distinction here between difficulty and evidence. Execution getting hard isn’t a reason to reopen the strategy. But material new evidence might be. If a critical assumption proves wrong, the market changes, or customers tell you something you didn’t know when you made the decision, you’d be foolish not to reconsider it. Commitment doesn’t mean blindly sticking with a bad decision. But it does mean we don’t relitigate a decision simply because executing it turned out to be harder than we hoped.

There’s a payoff to this beyond just feeling more unified. Teams that stop relitigating a decision get their energy back. All that mental effort spent weighing the same choice over and over goes straight into the work instead. Focus improves.

Commitment can also create its own powerful reinforcing loop. Commitment drives effort. Effort creates progress. Progress builds confidence. And confidence strengthens commitment. That loop gives the strategy a much better chance than a team that’s still debating whether they agree with it.

Debate hard before the decision. Get everyone to at least a seven. Then commit 100 percent.

I love how this article shows that one of the biggest ways commitment plays a role is that it actually changes our self-identity, and then we go about our lives living up to that new identity. As it says, “People have an innate desire to be consistent with their words and actions.” There’s a great breakdown of a variety of useful ways to implement a commitment process. Don’t sleep on the idea of combining commitment with storytelling to really allow it to take hold. Stories stick in our heads, and creating stories for us to live up to can really cement the idea.

The psychology of commitment is well-established. This article connects to a ton of different points of research, if you want to dig deeper. But he also summarizes each finding pretty well so you can get a strong cursory understanding just from this article. Understanding how our brains process commitment is well worth the few-minute read.

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.”
— W.H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951)

Do you think Spotify ever considered themselves “the limit of human felicity?” Because the 1888 book “Looking Backward” by Edward Bellamy imagined a future of music on demand in every home as just that. So much of what we consider normal and mundane in our daily lives was at one point in history considered an absolute technological miracle. This fascinating article takes a walk through a normal day in a modern apartment and compares everything in it to historical references that made it possible.

It was a valiant effort.

I hope you’ll check out my Amazon #1 bestselling book, The Strategy Trap: Why Companies Fail at Execution and How to Get It Right.

If you’ve ever struggled to turn team agreement into consistent action, the book goes deep on how to fix that, with practical tools, real-world stories, and a framework for turning strategy into results. If you know someone who struggles to turn strategy into results, please forward this along.