Taking the metaphor of the alignment puzzle a little further…
Organisations exist to amplify the energies of a group of people and achieve that which individuals alone cannot. The smallest ‘parts’ which make up an organisation are, of course, people. While there are material aspects to an organisation (e.g. physical assets, brand, information, technology etc.), these items are there to serve the people.
While each person offers a unique contribution and holds individual perspectives, management practices are designed to apply and improve similar kinds of capabilities. Personal behaviour and skill sets do need to be managed, but this form of management is conducted in a completely different frame of reference than that of groups of people. I appreciate that these frames may grow closer, but practically, in today’s professional management practices, the focus is on groups of practitioners.
So, in order to solve the puzzle of management alignment, we first need to be able to recognise the different pieces which have to be put together. Management science and a hundred years of professional and academic insights have contributed countless lists of pieces – representing a jigsaw of millions of pieces – but still missing the one big picture on the front of the box!
Easier access to information and greater collaboration between management groups over the past twenty or so years has resulted in a growing realisation that the future of management rests on our ability to improve and govern dynamic collaboration between groups of people offering collective capabilities.
In an attempt to help describe this landscape, many management communities offer their own version of the picture on the outside of the puzzle box, usually placing their capability at the focal point of the picture. See for example, these big pictures constructed with a specific perspective in mind:
- Managing Successful Programs and Prince2
- The Balanced Scorecard Performance System
- Organisation wide Value Chain Processes
- Cross industry Supply Chain Processes
- Enterprise wide Governance, Risk and Control
- Enterprise wide Architecture
and the list goes on…
In a sense, we’ve moved from the challenge of trying to align all the pieces without having a big picture, to trying to align all the pieces using hundreds of pictures, each of which is just different enough from the other to prevent a single, cohesive, perspective from being established.
Today, communities devote great time and effort to refining the picture from their perspective and focusing on getting their ‘pieces’ in shape. But the question is – in shape for what? In the absence of an overarching common picture, each community shapes pieces to fit in their own picture – regardless of the holes and jagged edges which this may cause to other pictures in which these pieces appear.
In my research, most of the proposed solutions to this challenge require that each community adopt fundamentally different pieces in order to fit together. In other words, “your pieces don’t fit, please throw those out and use these which were designed to fit from the outset – and don’t change them”. This solution is usually accompanied by new tools and methods to make this job ‘easy’. For example, just get project managers to use a new enterprise architecture tool instead of PM tools, or just get the HR manager to use a risk control tool instead of an employee profile tool.
I don’t think is ever going to work. Instead, I think you need to encourage communities to specialise in order to serve their role in support of the organisation. This requires a much clearer agreement about what the role of the group is, what the capabilities of the group are, and how those capabilities are offered to support other communities. This approach requires more focus at the ‘edge’ of a community and some agreement about how the concepts managed by one group depend upon those of another group.
If you can identify and agree what the ‘edge’ pieces are in each region of the puzzle, it becomes a lot easier to align the regions together. Organisational alignment requires an organisation wide picture in which to align these regions and in my experience, there are a number of primitive mechanisms underlying all of these puzzles.
What specifically are these pieces? Are they bricks? Dollars? Systems? Project Plans? Boards? Products? Divisions?
Yes and no. The pieces come from the conceptual frameworks which have been adopted in each community of practice. These frameworks are reflected in the language, tools, methods and behaviour of the practitioners in each community.The key to aligning management practices is to relate concepts managed by one group with those of another.
To pick these concept pieces up, you can look into the methods which are employed by various management groups in your organisation. While the list of methods is huge and continues to grow, the methods which have been formally adopted by a community within your organisation is usually small.
Stretching the puzzle idea further still, each organisation will have a different ‘picture’ but there are primitive patterns which can be seen in all of these pictures.
By anticipating these patterns, it becomes a lot easier to pick up the pieces of your specific organisational puzzle, group the pieces into common areas and start to try matching the edge of one region with another.
I have reviewed hundreds of different conceptual frameworks across many fields of management and been hands on applying a number of these in my work.This experience has helped me to recognise a number of recurring, common perspectives held by members of management communities irrespective of the organisation in which they are practising.
