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Designing With People, Not Just for Them
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: Organizations often introduce new systems and processes without adequately involving the people who understand how work actually gets done, only to interpret subsequent workarounds and inconsistent adoption as employee resistance. Designing with people rather than simply for them brings practical knowledge and experience into decisions about what…
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Death by Playbook: Why Copy-Paste Growth Fails
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: Growth playbooks can provide useful guidance, but adopting another organization’s strategies, structures and practices without understanding the conditions that made them successful can create more problems than they solve. Sustainable scaling requires an understanding of your own business’s ambitions, capabilities and constraints rather than assuming that someone…
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Beyond the Family Fortune: Alice Walton and the Meaning of Success
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: An Instagram post featuring the world’s wealthiest women brought me back to Sam Walton’s Made in America, one of the first success stories I ever read and loved. Curious about his daughter Alice Walton, I began investigating what she had accomplished and discovered a different expression of…
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Perfect Harmony, Broken Infrastructure: The Illusion of Strategic Alignment
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: An organization can have a beautifully articulated strategic plan, with its vision, mission, values and priorities appearing perfectly aligned, while its structures, systems and everyday practices contradict what it intends to achieve. Meaningful strategic alignment requires more than agreement on direction; the organization’s operating infrastructure must support…
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Our Decisions Can Never Consistently Rise Above Our Understanding of Ourselves
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal Post in two sentences: Leadership development invests heavily in developing what leaders do, yet pays far less attention to understanding the person doing it. Our decisions can never consistently rise above our understanding of ourselves. My reasoned choice is as indifferent to the reasoned choice of my neighbor as to his…
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What Happens When the Obvious is Misleading?
The obvious deserves attention. It just doesn’t always deserve to be part of the conclusion. We are conditioned to respond to what we can see. Most of us don’t witness the beginning of a problem. We encounter it only after it has worked its way to the surface. By then, what we call “the problem”…
business leadership, business strategy, continuous improvement, critical thinking, Decision-Making, executive leadership, Leadership & Practice, leadership development, Organizational Alignment, organizational development, organizational effectiveness, pre-decision diagnostics, problem solving, root cause analysis, sensemaking, strategic diagnosis, Strategic thinking, strategy, systems thinking -
The Leaders We Have Vs. Leaders We Need
One of the defining strategic challenges of this decade is the widening gap between the leaders we have and the leaders we need. This is not simply a leadership shortage. It is a leadership mismatch. Organizations continue to promote people into roles that were designed for yesterday’s problems while expecting them to solve tomorrow’s. The…
adaptive leadership, business strategy, change management, continuous learning, executive leadership, future of leadership, future of work, Leadership & Practice, leadership design, leadership development, leadership mindset, organizational culture, organizational development, Strategic Alignment Journal, strategic leadership, systems thinking -
Beware of Inertia
Have you ever walked into a room looking for something and forgotten why you entered? For a moment, you stand there trying to reconstruct your original purpose. You moved and are now standing in the room yet somewhere along the way, you forgot your reason for being there in the first place. Organizations can experience…
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Conversion of Knowledge of Acquaintance into Knowledge About Is a Risky Exercise
My WHY, according to the WHY Institute, is Make Sense. When I first encountered the WHY.os framework, I remember feeling a strange sense of recognition. The WHY Institute describes a WHY as the fundamental motivation that drives a person’s behavior, decisions, and way of seeing the world. In their model, the WHY is expressed through…
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