Since the Cognitive Revolution roughly 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens have differentiated themselves from the rest of the natural world by one key factor, the ability to communicate and align around shared stories and myths in order to connect, cooperate, and collaborate at massive scale.1
There is no other known living creature that can organize around invisible stories such as gods, nations, corporations, religions, monetary systems, etc. and this has been the defining characteristic of humans ever-since. Our stories and myths are what allow us to align millions or billions of people around common ideologies and to perform common actions, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, but a trait that is always a uniquely human capacity.
This ultimately means that in order for humans to accomplish anything significant, as an individual or even as an entire species, we need to be able to achieve alignment in order to successfully collaborate (meaning work together in order to achieve a single shared goal.)
The foundational decision-making principle Communicate and Align means that across all personal, business, and societal situations there needs to be a proactive evaluation of how you will effectively communicate and achieve alignment, both externally with others and internally within yourself. Thoughtful and effective communication and alignment attacks the root cause of the vast majority of day to day issues and should not be overlooked.
The first component of the principle is “Communicate” because achieving alignment always first requires some form of communication. You need visibility and transparency to the objectives, priorities, beliefs, etc. of all parties first in order to ultimately pursue any levels of alignment. Metaphorically, all parties first need to get the same book, before they can figure out how to “get on the same page”.
Thankfully, discussions on the topic of increasing and improving communication have become more common nowadays, but there is a massive gap in terms of understanding why communication matters in the first place.
The purpose is not to communicate just for the sake of communicating, which is a common mistake. Communication is actually the “means to an end” of increasing alignment, which is the true purpose because it allows a group to proverbially all pull in the same direction in order to effectively achieve certain objectives.
Alignment critically reminds you that communication isn’t about what you want to say, it’s about creating a shared result among multiple parties.
Furthermore, alignment reminds you to have a vision/objective in mind before communicating instead of just broadcasting random thoughts. You need to start with the end in mind in order to ensure that your communication is valuable in terms of effectively driving alignment towards the larger objectives.
This brings us to the second component of the principle, which is “Align”. This means to ensure 2 things:
#1 Get on the same page
It is virtually guaranteed that you are currently making an astonishingly simple mistake. That mistake is assuming that people (colleagues, spouse, family member, etc.) are aligned with you on the Four W’s (Who, What, When, Why):
- Who makes which decisions?
- What exactly is each person responsible for, accountable for, consulted on, and informed about? What do we communicate to each other and on what cadence/frequency?
- When should things be started and completed? (the current order of priority and current schedule)
- Why does it matter? e.g. how does it connect to larger objectives, goals, purpose, etc.
Getting on the same page means that you ensure that the vision/mission/purpose, core values, strategic objectives, current priority, and roles and responsibilities are all crystal clear, re-communicated regularly, translated into relevant levels of detail at all layers of the team/organization, and interpreted in the same way by all parties.
#2 Stay on the same page
The world changes rapidly and as a result alignment doesn’t maintain itself. You need to ensure that you reinforce step #1 by structurally integrating those components you aligned on into daily life/behavior/operations. You must do much more than just “not get in the way” of alignment, you need to facilitate and guarantee alignment but integrating it into the day to day with concrete and specific mechanisms, otherwise you end up with a conflict between reality and aspiration.
Some examples of mechanisms include: what metrics you measure, what criteria you hold for hiring and firing, how you structure compensation and incentives, how you design standard processes, how you hold meetings, and how you plan and track budgets.
Unfortunately, to say that awareness and achievement of alignment is rare across society would be a massive understatement, and its lack of effective execution causes inevitable and costly issues as we’ll discuss below.
How important are Communication and Alignment?
Using business organizations as an example, here are insights into the extraordinary magnitude of impact that communication and alignment have and how commonly lacking they are:
2005 research from Harvard professors Robert Kaplan and David Norton (famous for their creation of the Balanced Scorecard) stunningly discovered that
on average, 95% of a company’s employees are unaware of, or do not understand, its strategy.
Furthermore,
- 90% of frontline employees and 70% of middle managers do not have strategy-linked compensation.
- 60% of companies do not link budgets to strategic priorities.
- 67% of HR and IT organizational strategies are not aligned with corporate strategy.
Ultimately, the painful result is that 90% of companies fail to deliver on the targets of their strategic plans because of this critical lack of alignment.
2018 research from MIT Sloan, performed across 124 organizations, found that
only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three of their company’s strategic priorities.
To make matters worse, only 51% of even the most senior executives agreed on the same list of strategic objectives for their company.
However not only is there a communication and alignment issue, it is also frequently overlooked because there is a significant disconnect between top management teams and the rest of the organization.
C-suite executives on average overestimate the organization’s alignment by about 20% or more versus middle and front-line managers, meaning that the issue does not get the attention or urgency that it deserves.
2017 research from McKinsey concluded that the most significant improvements in organizational health were generated by improving the organizational outcome of “Direction”, which is driven by pursuing communication and alignment in order to achieve 3 management practices: Shared vision, Strategic clarity, and Employee involvement.
The “Direction” organizational outcome was so important that it generated almost 4 times (367%) as much organizational health improvement as the least influential factors.
In a 2013 report by the Project Management Institute (PMI), they discovered that organizations that are highly-effective communicators are 4.5 times more likely to be high-performing organizations vs. organizations which are minimally-effective communicators (38% vs. 7%). They stated that
the most crucial success factor in project management is effective communications to all stakeholders—a critical core competency to all organizations.
The report also revealed that:
- Organizations that prioritize strategic alignment complete projects successfully almost 3 times as often (90% success rate vs. 34% success rate).
- 7.5% of every single dollar spent on any project is typically at risk specifically due to ineffective communications.
Similarly, Willis Towers Watson concluded in a 2012 study that companies which have highly-effective communications practices are 1.7 times more likely to outperform their peers financially, and in a 2016 study uncovered that only 60% of employees believe that their managers communicate goals and assignments clearly, and only 40% of employees have managers who coach them to improve their performance.
Two of the most influential modern business authors, Jim Collins and Patrick Lencioni, have both come to similar conclusions that alignment is the keystone for organizational success.
Collins definitively states that
Building a visionary company requires 1% vision and 99% alignment. When you have superb alignment, a visitor could drop in from outer space and infer your vision from the operations and activities of the company without ever reading it on paper or meeting a single senior executive. Creating alignment may be your most important work. 2
Meanwhile, the entirety of Lencioni’s book, The Advantage, is focused on the critical need to establish alignment in an organization. For example, he writes,
Healthy organizations believe that performance management is almost exclusively about eliminating confusion. They realize that most of their employees want to succeed, and that the best way to allow them to do that is to give them clear direction, regular information about how they’re doing, and access to the coaching they need. 3
And,
Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare. 3
Ultimately the resounding conclusion from all of the above is that proactive and effective communication and alignment is a remarkably powerful force in organizing people to successfully collaborate in ways large and small.
However, as always it is important to remember that the principle holds true far beyond just business organizations and pervades every aspect of personal life, relationships, and society.
Non-business examples of the Communicate and Align principle:
Government
Within governments, the US as an example, you can clearly see issues of Communication and Alignment at both macro and micro levels.
For example, we critically don’t have any alignment on the ultimate vision for the country. Do we believe America should be a global leader in education, healthcare, technology, innovation, manufacturing, avg net worth/income, quality of life, etc.? Do we believe America should be a global military leader or more isolationist? Do we believe in more globalist trade or more protectionism? Can we point to a single metric that quantifies whether or not we are improving/progressing towards our goals?
To be clear, alignment does not require that everybody agrees to exactly the same policies. Instead, alignment means that you align around a shared vision and core values for the country, but then freely debate/negotiate/compromise on how exactly to reach that vision while practicing those core values.
Otherwise, how could we be surprised that any group of people, whether a few dozen or hundreds of millions, has difficulty operating when it can’t align on a basic vision of success and metrics to measure progress?
When you don’t have a common vision and values to align around, people don’t have a compelling alternative to their partisan narratives and therefore start latching onto random “fad” ideologies, supposed outsiders, conspiracy theories, forms of anarchism, etc., all of which we’ve seen become increasingly common in current society.
We should remember that in 1969, 94% of all US television households and almost 20% of the entire human population on earth (650M of 3.6B) tuned in to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing, watching on average 15+ hours of the coverage. These are seemingly unthinkable levels of common alignment nowadays but remind us that the possibility of aligning massive groups of people around a common vision is not unachievable.
Relationships
Researchers at UNC found that alignment is a key factor in healthy relationships, concluding that
Thus, the present research suggests that the process of attitude alignment may be an integral component of the means by which partners manage to sustain (and possibly, to promote) healthy functioning in ongoing close relationships. 4
Individuals
At the even more granular level of the individual: Fritz Heider’s Balance Theory and P-O-X model, as well as Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance theory, both conclude that individuals strive for psychological alignment among their identity, beliefs, ideas, values, preferences, and actions.
They conclude that the act of having misalignment among those areas causes “psychological dissonance” and individuals will act decisively to resolve any misalignments in order to achieve cognitive consistency. Festinger wrote,
Cognitive dissonance can be seen as an antecedent condition which leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads toward activity oriented toward hunger reduction. It is a very different motivation from what psychologists are used to dealing with but, as we shall see, nonetheless powerful. 5
Additional articles, case studies, maturity models, and tools coming soon.
1 Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Toronto: Signal.
2 Collins, J., Porras, J., (1996) Building Your Company’s Vision. Harvard Business Review.
3 Lencioni, P. (2012). The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
4 Davis, J., Rusbult, C., (2001). Attitude Alignment in Close Relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 81, no. 1, 83
5 Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. California: Stanford University Press.