Strategic alignment is hard
Multiverse Mapping Series Part 1: Team Hawk and Team Otter
Hey there,
Ever been in a situation where you were doing “all the right things” but it wasn’t working out? And you couldn’t quite figure out what was missing?
You’re not alone. It’s one of the most common situations I help clients with.
I’ve found that it’s rarely about the people involved. They’re smart, motivated and good.
Instead, it’s about the interactions between those people: the conversations they’re having – or not having.
They end up talking past one another because they use different language. I’d go as far as to say they live in different worlds. And in the most insidious cases this goes unnoticed.
In one version of this story, everyone leaves meetings happy, believing they’re all on the same page. Then weeks later, when they see the work that others have been doing, they realise they were using the same words to mean wildly different things.
In another version of this story, everyone leaves meetings frustrated, believing they’re being clear and that it’s the “other side” who are wilfully misunderstanding. They don’t realise that each “side” is being perfectly clear in their own language. Harder still, even with the best will in the world, it can be impossible to truly speak the “other side’s” language because you can’t spend enough time in their world.
OK, let’s meet two sides: Team Hawk and Team Otter.
Stakeholders and sponsors (Team Hawk in the image above) have a high-level overview, but don’t get a close-up view of the messy reality.
Meanwhile, designers and builders (Team Otter in the image above) dive deep into the messy work, but don’t get the high-level overview.
There’s a gap between the two, and it’s a gap of granularity. In other words, how big or small are the chunks that you work with?
Team Hawk operates at very coarse granularity. Big chunks. They have to keep track of lots of these. They make broad decisions based on the surface of the chunks – the high-level summary and expected business impact. They tend to measure activity in months and years.
Team Otter operates at very fine granularity. Tiny chunks. They have to break down big projects in order to make progress. They make micro-decisions based on the fine details. They tend to measure activity in minutes, hours and days.
Now, Team Hawk often wants to know more about a project ... but they can’t handle the huge number of very fine details that Team Otter are working with. There’s just too much of it, and it mostly sounds like gobbledegook:
“Well you see to optimise the latency bottlenecks, we’re implementing a horizontally sharded, polyglot persistence architecture with dynamic schema evolution on a distributed NoSQL backend.”
- Team Otter explaining a perfectly obvious technical detail to Team Hawk
And there you have it: a recipe for people talking past each other. Team Hawk need to know whether the overall project is on track to get the expected results, but Team Otter tends to talk about a highly specific problem with an arcane technical system.
This teaches Team Hawk to stop digging for details and instead push to know “when will it be done?”.
And then it’s very easy for the details of the work to get completely disconnected from the goals of the work.
The quote above is a deliberate parody of technical language. It doesn’t have to be anywhere near that extreme to create this same dynamic. A subtle way Hawks and Otters can end up talking past one another is when Hawks are asking to see options so they can choose a strategy, while Otters are asking for a clear strategy so they can create the right options. Catch-22.
What can help resolve this Catch-22? Adding in the missing layers of granularity to bridge the gap.
We can do that by telling a story about what our success depends on.
Want to learn how to tell this story? I’d love for you to join my Intro to Multiverse Mapping on Tuesday 21st January at 5-6pm GMT.
In this hour-long session (it’s free!) we’re gonna start mapping out the behaviours our success depends on so we can make more sense of them. And we’ll create clarity with a little less conversation and a little more pointing at drawings.
Register here: https://lu.ma/u5ph0k5e
See you there,
Tom x