Alignment is Not Agreemennt
When I was leading a practice in the innovation consulting world, I developed a pseudo-sales technique: we would workshop the proposal live with the prospective client. This wasn't just about making a sale; it was about improving the odds of the project’s success.
More often than not, the person seeking the proposal wasn't the only stakeholder involved. Yet the only way an innovation initiative (or any kind of change effort) will succeed is if all stakeholders share the same objectives and desired outcomes.
Does that require alignment or agreement?
A recent Harvard Business Review article, The False Alignment Trap, explains the difference. Alignment simply means, "We're not getting in each other’s way." That can range from benign indifference to passive deference.
Neither has the power of genuine agreement.
Offering our services before the sale using the proposal workshop method helped prospective clients assess whether we could deliver the work and helped us assess whether they were ready to implement the results. All of this was possible because we were participating in the same conversation at the same time.
The approach worked remarkably well. We had an 80 percent conversion rate and closed deals in a fraction of the time it usually took to send written proposals back and forth.
And the times we didn't convert? Those were also valuable.
I'll never forget one workshop with a large pharmaceutical company. The group was aligned that they wanted to pursue the project, but there was little agreement about their current reality or what success would actually look like.
There was no proposal to write and yet value was still delivered.
"You just saved us about a million dollars by helping us realize we're not ready to move forward with this project," their leader told us.
Several months later, they returned. In the interim they had transformed their weak alignment into strong agreement, and we were able to move forward together.
I'm about to help guide a strategic planning process for a large design firm where translating vision into implementation will require clear agreement on priorities and desired results.
How confident are you that your team is truly in agreement about where it's going—and how it's spending its time to get there? Because alignment may keep people from getting in one another's way, but agreement is what moves them forward.