Align for Success
Organizational Alignment and Alignment Leverage Points
Alignment is one of the key characteristics of high performing organizations.
What is organizational alignment?
I understand organizational alignment as a realistic state of an organization where various organizational
components support each other and contribute to the achievement of organizational goals.
Why is organizational alignment important?
More aligned organisations
perform better, are more innovative, creative and agile than less aligned counterparts.
Misalignment
results in spending more company resources, failure of strategic initiatives, less agility, and less adaptation to the changing environment.
Recognition of current misalignment,
even if it persists, leads to positive results.
Why are organizations not aligned?
Organizations are in flux
and it is difficult to see how alignment occurs.
Alignment tools and models
only partially help align organizations, they do not include all organizational dimensions and/or all connections between those dimensions and/or connections across all organizational levels.
Complexity
Organizations acknowledge importance of alignment but because of its complexity their alignment state leaves much to be desired.
Counter intuitivity
Misalignment can be counterintuitive and is often not seen by top management.
How can we help organizations align?
We propose to use the method I developed to identify alignment gaps and alignment leverage points. This method visualizes chains of misalignments whose counterintuitive details are hidden even from the executives of the organizations tested. The method can be adapted and applied to organisations with different contexts and structures, and complex organisational structures are not an obstacle to the implementation of the instrument.