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The Blind Spot of Expertise
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: Experience helps us recognize patterns, make informed decisions and interpret complex situations, but it can also lead us to rely on familiar explanations without recognizing what makes a situation different. The value of expertise lies not only in what we know, but in our willingness to question…
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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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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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Feeding the Cobra: Why Our Fixes Backfire
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: Organizations sometimes introduce solutions that unintentionally encourage the very behaviors or conditions they are trying to eliminate, leaving problems unresolved or even making them worse. Understanding how interventions influence behavior, incentives and organizational practices is essential to avoiding unintended consequences and recognizing when the solution itself has…
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Your clients should never feel your org chart
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: Your org chart may make perfect sense inside your organization, but your clients should never have to experience its boundaries. Sometimes the weakness in the client experience is not at any individual touchpoint, but in how the client is handed from one person or department to another.…
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Before you Decide What to Fix, Ask this…
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: When something stops producing the result we expect, our instinct is often to start fixing. Before deciding what needs to change, it may be more useful to identify what changed first. When anything stops working, our attention usually goes straight to the problem. The temptation is to…
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A Decision Does Not Contain a Predictive Component
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: A good decision does not tell us what will happen. It simply reflects the quality of the understanding from which the choice was made. What makes one decision better than another? When we make a decision, we are not saying, “I know what will happen.” We are…
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You Cannot Deviate From a Baseline You Do Not Have
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: A deviation only tells us something when there is a consistent baseline against which to recognise it. Before trying to correct what has gone wrong, it is worth asking whether a reliable standard, rhythm or way of working ever existed in the first place. Dr Howard Luks…
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Beware: Systems have Delays
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: We often expect system changes to produce visible results quickly, and when they do not, we can mistake delay for failure and intervene again too soon. The better response is not simply to wait, but to look for early signals that the conditions for the intended outcome…
Get Clarity before the Fix
