Abstract: Success requires extreme alignment, an intense clarity of the intent and reasoning behind what truly matters for the organization, shared by everybody with a part to play in that success. Failure to achieve this alignment exists in every organization I’ve encountered. The cost of poor alignment is staggering, leading to wasted efforts and duplicated work on a huge scale. The cost of forcing alignment through top-down techniques is equally wasteful, denying human potential, disempowering your workforce, and adding friction to every action performed in the enterprise. The strategies required to excel require bringing together many disparate perspectives drawn from your many functional silos and organizations, followed by well-aligned activity by hundreds or thousands of practitioners in every part of your company.
This talk addresses the core challenge head on: Senior leadership lacks the tools and approaches to effectively articulate the strategies they conceive, frequently failing to achieve clarity within their own leadership team, much less across their entire organization. We help senior leaders and their influencers explore the common symptoms resulting from poor articulation, discuss the application of one OKR-based approach to creating effective strategic clarity across many siloes, and explore how the resulting strategies are then deployed with alignment into typical agile implementations using the Scaled Agile Framework as an example. Groups applying these techniques have seen an immediate increase in the ability to coordinate across functions, as well as dramatically improved energy focused on the key tactics to advance the core company strategies.
Learning Outcomes: - Recognize symptoms of poor alignment.
- Facilitate leadership awareness of the challenge
- Apply basic framing techniques using OKRs
- Transition strategic intent into various functional organization
