The contemporary focus on operational improvements a la TQM and Reengineering can result in "doing the wrong things right." This means that the organization invests its talents, time and money into pursuing perfection for a product/service that has already seen its heyday. Indeed, with today's ever-shortening product/service life-cycles, pursuit of operational perfection can be futile folly after time has already run out your organization's offering to the marketplace. If the risk of doing the wrong things right is acceptable to you, then continue to focus only on operational improvement and stop reading now. Add money and Dilbert cartoon strips, then stir with a low-grade fever for as many accounting periods as the cosmos will permit because eventually your luck will run out. On the other hand, if you want to do the right things and are willing to do them imperfectly for a time until you get them right — suffering Dilbert's scoffing humor — then read on and let's get down to business! For starters, let's fire Dilbert whose humor is too often embedded in a feeble need for bureaucratic security, pathological and anal-retentive perfectionism, and too-cute intolerance of ambiguity in an ambiguous age. Let's instead muster the incandescent courage and imagination that it takes to focus on aligned strategy.

As more organizations show renewed interest in strategic planning, they seek to establish stretch goals to make Big Things Happen. More mention is being made of the term, alignment — by leaders, managers, management consultants and others. The purpose of this brief article is to describe alignment briefly in its key aspects and implications.

Alignment, whether described with gloss and abstraction, or with operational precision, is something that an organization will not achieve overnight. Sadly, too many folks are confusing strategic planning with operational effectiveness improvement gambits, e.g., TQM, Reengineering or Zeitgeist X. Improving operational effectiveness is oh-so-important but it won't keep you ahead of the pack because the rest of the dogs in the pack are doing the same thing, e.g., reducing error and cycle time, etc. Genuine strategic alignment relates to the transitional scaffolding by which an organization is in motion from some "as-is" condition to some "should-be" future condition. In this sense, the alignment scaffolding needs to provide a modicum of structure and continuity but flexibly so, affording the organization a provisional revolutionary framework of time, space, and disposable concepts and procedures that will take us from here to there.

Alignment, as you will frequently hear it used, sounds a lot like motherhood and apple pie. How can one be against alignment? Indeed, how can an effort succeed if the pieces are not aligned? It sounds wrong even before you know what the pieces are! What pieces? It could be the pieces of people, organization, and technology. Or, it might be a different characterization, say, strategy, structure, and systems. Or, how about vision, skills, incentives, resources, and action plans?

This article does not argue against alignment. We are for alignment. However, if your management and/or your consultants are describing alignment with the holy background music and velveteen curtains that seems too much like apple pie and motherhood, your antenna should go up. Effective alignment is less about Mom, and a whole lot more about a temporary conceptual frame that has a bit of radical and revolutionary flavor to it.

Strategic planning and alignment is about change during a fast-moving, quickbreak time that commingles continuity with discontinuity. The motherhood and apple pie definition plays into the scoffing Dilbert humor. Dilbert is not ready for the change revolution. Alignment is about the flying-in-formation force of Transformation: This is not a safe place for our Dilly-boy, for goodness' sake.

So pick your poison and find an alchemy of alignment that fits the speed and magnitude of your organization's strategic change trajectory: No matter what conceptual reference you prefer, e.g., people/organization/technology or strategy/structure/systems, alignment is critical for several reasons that presuppose a degree of management thinking and influence that is greater than the individual silos of the organization. Alignment presupposes transcendence that is the seeing-the-game-board-from-above helicopter view. After all, this is what Leadership is supposed to bring to the party. Alignment presupposes something real that will actually change the way business is done because alignment and change must go hand-in-hand. So it's more than a pointy-headed intellectual exercise where the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin are to be counted correctly and dubbed "alignment." Deep inside the term, "alignment," ought to reside a dark, resonant, and angry dissatisfaction with feeble management intellectualism, e.g., paint-by-numbers TQM zealotry, because this feeble thought militates against Change. If you view alignment as some fragile, theoretical perfection that holds for a half-hour or so until that nasty ol' dynamic world sweeps away the ersatz perfection yet again, then you are missing the point and setting yourself up as the brunt of a new Dilbert strip, or worse yet, joining Dilbert World-Wide.

As more organizations grant themselves permission to think strategically, the oft-heard question becomes what makes for good strategy? Part of the answer is that good strategy is aligned strategy. While formulation of a single strategy can be relatively straightforward, the trick and problem is that a strategy does not exist by itself, just as no man is an island. A strategy must share resources with other strategies, hanging together in harmony with the balance of an organization's strategic plan. Examples of organizations that have invested considerable time, effort, and money into developing a strategic plan that then collapsed of its own weight or otherwise faded into oblivion are legion. Why so many failures? You guessed it. Many planning failures can be attributed to a lack of alignment.

One more time, what exactly is alignment? There is no one firm answer, let alone a "final" one, but I offer an evolving definition of alignment that emerges from today's reading, thinking, and working with both private and federal agency clients. Alignment is:

• Strategic Sufficiency, meaning that we have consciously planned to exploit our internal strengths, compensate our existing weaknesses, and achieve goodness of fit among our efforts and with the efforts of our customers, partners, and stakeholders.
  
• Strategic Comprehensiveness and Comprehensibility, meaning that our plan covers all the necessary bases and it makes sufficient sense so that staff can implement it without a lot of mystical guesswork.
  
• Solid Strategic Joints, meaning that we have identified and agreed upon coordination steps with other offices/units in the organization that are outside of one's immediate control but whose contributions are needed for plan implementation
  
• Strategic Traceability, meaning that goals, objectives, and strategies attach to live offices and individuals: Everyone can eventually understand their contributory roles relative to the plan's multiple objectives and strategies. Traceability refers to the future measurability of the plan and the tracking, performance feedback and correction/replanning cycle that will need to follow in the interests of accountability.

Each of these four alignment components is discussed below.

Alignment Component No. 1: Strategic Sufficiency

Criteria by which we can judge the Sufficiency of our strategies include an examination of the degree to which a given strategy:

• Exploits opportunities to conserve resources through expanded involvement by our customers and our partners, i.e., have we explored ways in which achievement of an objective can leverage the resources and talents of another organization(s) to a greater extent than ever before, thereby reducing the need for additional expense?
  
  
• Builds on discrete activities so that they cumulate to greater impact rather than cancelling one another out.
  
  
• Links seemingly disparate activities together to provide new benefits or an expansion of problem-solving capability.
  
  
• Eliminates wasted effort and redundancy.
  
  
• Achieves cost-benefit proportionality, i.e., the importance of the objective served by the strategy and the cost of implementing the strategy are proportional such that costs and benefits reasonably commensurate with one another. Alternately, should a "pilot light" or "minimalist" approach to the objective? Do we run the risk of investing great sophistication and attempts at perfection for an objective that is relatively unimportant?
  
  
• Builds on existing strengths in a realistic manner and does so without enfeebling existing strengths where it would be ill-advised to do so.
  
  
• Builds on realism concerning weaknesses that would impede achievement of the objective and spells out an approach which compensates the weakness through a strategic alliance, partner or contractor, or corrects it by direct and appropriate application of resources.
  
  
• Arrays people, organization, technology, and budget so that implementation is feasible.

Numerous other templates are useful in discovering whether you are approaching alignment. Is there are porous fit among the organizational components within the organization? Is there strong fit among the roles, responsibilities, and interfaced transactions of the organization, its customers, its partners and suppliers?

Is there good fit among the investment of resources and the stage of maturity in the product/service life cycle? Hey, Bob Dylan once wrote, "those not busy being born are busy dying." Are we investing in that which is being born rather than in that which is dying?

Similarly are we majoring in the majors and minoring in the minors? By this I mean are we investing time and energy in planning a future for areas that are the most important rather than polishing the rock of that which is admittedly imperfect but relatively unimportant?

These "matching principles" of strategy are essential to sound strategic alignment and what is intended by the term, strategic sufficiency.

Alignment Component No. 2: Strategic Comprehensiveness and Comprehensibility

You must have high involvement of people in your organization if you are to satisfy this litmus test. When you involve your people successfully, appealing to their personal values and pride, you can neutralize the Dilbert factor to a greater extent. The fruits of high involvement can include comprehensiveness and comprehensibility as defined hereafter.

Comprehensiveness means that the strategies and tactics required to support a given objective have been spelled out completely, i.e., key actions needed to support top-level objectives aren't missing. Comprehensiveness should not mean an endless compilation of tactics and facts.

Comprehensibility means that in addition to being relatively complete, the elements of the plan can be understood by Everyperson.

Part of the problem with strategic planning in the past has been the practice and expectation of planning as a low frequency/high-impact "event." This is a game that is difficult, probably impossible to win. Planning as a once per year (or worse) activity places an unrealistic burden on the Magic Management Method to yield the occasional transformational miracle. How about planning as a high frequency/low-impact event with a fighting chance of success through sympodial transformation of the organization much as a vine grows around a tree and building?

This is another way of saying that the plan needs to made visible and useful. Attainment of comprehensiveness and comprehensibility means involving virtually everyone in the group grope towards meaning; the everyone certainly includes key customers, partners, and suppliers. The Dilberts who stand on the sidelines waiting to make their cynical jokes, anxious to participate in the funeral for Yet Another Launch-and-Abandon Exercise may need to spend more time solving problems in an effort to achieve Launch-and-Arrival, and less time gravedancing around the 6-foot deep hole that they have pre-dug for others!

Alignment Component No. 3: Solid Strategic Joints

You have neither strategic plan nor strategic management if management misses its chance to add significant value through the creation of Solid Strategic Joints. Overseeing an independent function can be taxing and arduous work but it is a relatively simple management task that robs management of the chance to make a big difference. Defining, negotiating, agreeing upon, experimenting, and refining coordination and synergistic junctures within the organization is where the "big bangs" of value can be unleashed. Stated differently, have we coordinated the plan between units and cross-functionally?

Are you regularly combing for unexploited synergistic possibilities for Solid Strategic Joints in your organization?

Alignment Component No. 4: Strategic Traceability

One meaning of traceability is to ensure that objectives and strategies are linked at all levels. Another aspect is that strategic intent becomes traceable from the most abstract level of vision to the most accountable levels of unit and individual performance planning and measurement that is as objective as humanly possible and quantitative to a greater extent than ever before.

There are three major steps to ensuring the measurability of your strategic plan:

1. Link measurement to strategy. Performance measures should be linked to the organization's strategy and the results it seeks to achieve. To be important, relevant, and useful, measures must ultimately tie back to the outcomes and results the organization is trying to achieve, its key strategies, core processes. Thus, knowledge about the goals and objectives and developing an understanding and definition of the program as a system being evaluated is key.
   
   
2. Identify Key Results Areas. Typically, these key results areas fall into groups related to customers, program results, core and support processes, and workforce/worklife. Key results areas should answer the questions: What results are critical to reaching our goals? How will we look different to our customers, stakeholders, and employees if we are successful?
   
   
3. Select performance measures. What are the key outcome and output measures?
   
   
   • Outcome Measure — An assessment of the results of a program activity compared to its intended purpose.
     
     
   • Output Measure — Tabulation, calculation, or recording of activity or effort. Can be expressed in quantitative or qualitative manner. The output leads to the outcome.

Loosely stated, objective is to goal as output is to outcome. Alignment means, in part, that you can trace accountable measures to your organization's Big Picture.

So, the next time someone says that alignment is needed for your organization as a whole, or for its plans and/or strategies, stop the music! Ask whether this alignment is about Mom or about making a revolution. And don't forget to ask whether there is a willingness to fire Dilbert or at least counsel the clown in a serious Come-to-the-Show meeting. Then, if the signals are auspicious, fly high and fast through the dense fog of change and stretch. And as you fly so beautifully, maintain your flying formation of strategic sufficiency, trace, and tight joints. Involve all the other planes in a developing plan that becomes comprehensible and comprehensive precisely because everyone got involved in the planning grope. Everyone got involved in the grope, and we didn't allow Dilbert to stand on the sidelines, sucking up payroll, waiting for yet another Launch-and-Abandon failure with a sick glee borne of his silent and unswerving glidepath to Retirement and Death.

Ron Gunn, management consultant, specializes in strategic management issues related to matrix management, business competition, business process reengineering and human resources. His work has been published by the American Management Association, The Futurist magazine, and in several trade association magazines and newsletters. He is a frequent speaker and trainer who consults to both business and government. Strategic Futures® is located in Alexandria, Virginia (voice: 703/836-8383; fax: 703/836-9192).