The Align System

A blue print for creating the adaptive, high performing organisations of the future.

The Align System is a holistic and pragmatic approach to positioning an organisation to survive and prosper in this post-covid, 4th industrial Revolution world.

Based on around 80 years of collective experience, The Align System is a distillation of experiencing first-hand the successes – and the failures -organisations have encountered as they attempted to respond to the changing world.

Origins of the System lie in a great number of conversations beginning in 2018. After analysing these experiences, we started recognising common patterns driving success, and common anti-patterns causing failure.

We refined and documented these patterns over a number of weekends in late 2019. Subsequently the system was first presented to the public at the meeting of the Amsterdam branch of the Business Agility Institute in January 2020.

This event was immediately before Covid struck. Organisations across the world were forced to change their ways of working to deal with the impact of that epidemic. We took some time to reassess our ideas in light of these changes. Our conclusion was they were even more relevant than ever. In this respect Covid was just another ‘black swan event’ that The Align System was created to deal with.

Why The 'Align' system?

We chose the name ‘Align’ because we feel the system solves one of the biggest problems we have seen so often. Misaligned purpose, structures, cultures and processes.

Inefficient efficiencies

Many organisations are structured and run based on traditional models that focus on localised efficiencies. However, over time these models have become less and less applicable to current circumstances. Assitionally, this focus on localised efficiency starts to drive conflicts of interest. Conflict of interest in turn surfaces self preservation, and the creation of silos. Consequently a vast amount of time is spent (and mostly lost) in ‘alignment meetings’ and similar activities. The result? The focus on localised efficiency drives down the efficiency of the organisation overall.

Removing misalignment

We believe most organisations have the ability to work faster, better and in a more relaxed way. How? By removing the anti-patterns that drive the nugatory effort and stress caused by misalignment.

We have witnessed teams who spend 40, 50, or even 60% of their time doing ‘workarounds’ to solve problems of misalignment. This is work that wouldn’t need to be done if the organisation stopped clinging to outdated structures and practices. If they changed org designs and practices based on concepts that originated in a world that no longer exists. Concepts whose time has long since passed.

Consequently then, as the name suggests, The Align System places great importance on the benefits achieved when an entire organisation is aligned behind a common purpose.

The Align System Fundamentals

In the introduction we describe the system as being holistic and pragmatic. The system must be pragmatic to provide practical solutions that go beyond being purely theoretical. It must also be holistic to address the entire organisation as a single entity and not be limited to particular functions or lifecycle phases.

pragmatic

The Align System is pragmatic because it is based on proven, real world experience of organisational change that have come to be known by terms such as ‘Agile’, ‘Business Agility’ and ‘DevOps’. Using these ways of working are widely recognised as the reasons why businesses such as Google, Amazon, AirBnB have come out of nowhere to dominate their respective markets so relatively quickly. From our experience we have come to recognize a number of common patterns that have driven successful transformations. Conversely we have come to recognise a number of common anti-patterns that have led to failure.

Non-prescriptive

Rather than create a prescriptive framework, we have used these patterns and anti-patterns as ‘guard rails’ in developing our system. Guard rails that build in ways to succeed, and push out paths to failure. Consequently we have a system to lead organisations to developing their own customised way of working. A way of working that is tailored to the the organisation’s own environment and specific needs.

The Align System is diametrically opposite to adopting an off-the-shelf ‘cookie cutter’ framework. We have found a characteristic that is common aspect of these off these ‘off shelf frameworks’.

The common trait is that they all try to predict every possible set of circumstances an organisation can face – but ahead of time. So each creates a solution that is both prescriptive, and also ‘one size fits all’. Although this usually seems great on paper, the implementation usually ends up being a compromise almost everywhere. It often smacks of ‘here’s a solution, now tell me your problem’.

Simple and Adaptive

The Align System begins with the simple but highly structured analysis of an organisation’s needs. We then build a customised solution out from this basic starting point. The solution only adds the essential parts. And at each stage chooses whatever solution is best suited to solving the particular problem the organisation faces. Like the complex adaptive systems it serves, The Align System is itself adaptive.

From the Agile Manifesto –
Simplicity — the art of maximising the amount of work not done — is essential.

Holistic

The Align System is holistic to deal with one of the most dominant anti-patterns we have found is the outdated idea of striving for local efficiency – which almost always is at the expense of overall success.

In business transformations, we have also found the local efficiency anti-pattern spawns a second anti-pattern. This anti-pattern appears as ‘we need to transform the business, but department department XYZ is out of scope’. This is like saying ‘I need to get fitter, but not my left hamstring or my right bicep’. If we don’t drive out these anti-patterns from day one, any transformation will be doomed. Consequently our system needs to be holistic – it needs to include every aspect of the organisation.

The need to transform...

The world in which we now exist is changing in so many ways, and at an ever increasing pace. Consequently the traditional models created to organise our business and professional life are rapidly becoming out of date. Consequently these need to be replaced with new new paradigms that more accurately reflect this new world.

Key among these outdated perspectives are management practices based on Taylorism. These practices tend to treat organisations as ‘machines’ that respond in very linear and predictable ways.

However, any organisation staffed by humans is a Complex Adaptive System. That is it behaves more like an living organism than as a machine. This is because in any such system people are an integral to the structure. As we know, people are capable of free thought and action rather than robotic and standardised behaviour.

Being Adaptive – as the name suggests – any kind of interaction with a complex adaptive system causes the system itself to adapt. Consequently the system may adapt its response to any form of input.

As Jack Welch warned, “When the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the
inside, the end is near.”

We believe the ideas behind the system apply equally to both new organisations in the process of forming, and equally well to more mature organisations seeking to respond to changes in their environment.

... but hope exists

Although our traditional comfort zones are being eroded and we need to find new ways to work, we don’t need to be so afraid – many of the ways to deal with these new challenges already exist – we just need to replace our existing paradigms with these new ones.

The Align System Anchors

We believe that everything is in a constant state of evolution, and accordingly we can no longer anchor our models and paradigms in fixed organisational structures and fixed processes, and need to find alternative anchors that can respond to this constant evolution.

We choose two main anchors –

The customer problem is front and centre at all times in everything we do.
Since everything is in constant flux we need to constantly assess if what we did yesterday is what we need to do tomorrow, so we design for constant evolution.

Although an organisation may need to become quite complex, The Align System always starts from the simplest representation. Only then do we add the necessary levels of complexity as and when they are needed. This is opposed to frameworks which start with a complex model that attempts to address all possible situations. However this requires users to gain an understanding of the entire frameowork. Then deciding on the removal of any unnecessary elements. This often results in a great deal of confusion, frustration and nugatory work.

Einstein said “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.”

Strong Foundations of the Align System

In building up from the simplest models, The Align System reflects the agile principle of simplicity – the art of maximising the amount of work not done. We have an emergent design and emergent architecture so at any time we are only doing the work that is necessary for our current goals.

We consider a business to be defined as an organisation which exists to turn a business hypothesis into a solution. A solution that a customer will pay for in order to solve a problem that they have.

For us any business comprises two aspects. An operational aspect which turns the business idea into a realisable solution. And an interactive aspect whereby the solution is provided to the user in exchange for some form of payment. These two aspects are inseparable and concurrent – they are neither phases nor sequential tasks.

The Pyramid of Achievement

Everything in The Align System is guided by what we call the Pyramid of Achievement. The pyramid comprises five layers. The first layer is Purpose. Once we have established our Purpose we can start to build the next layer whcih is Structure. We use our Purpose to guide how we design our Structure and rather than use some predetermined structure for historical or other reasons. The third layer is Culture which depends on purpose and structure and sets the values and behaviours with which we will conduct our activities. Only then can we start to decide on the Processes that people use to create her product. Only once we know these Processes can we start to adopt Tools to help us deliver these processes in more efficient and effective ways.

We have come to realise that this pyramid exists and is the basis of success in any activity, because we have seen so many instances when honest endeavour and sufficient resources have failed to deliver an intended outcome. This is either because one of the layers of the pyramid have been missed or they are incompatible with the adjacent level.

See the pyramid, not the tip of an iceberg

Many people vaguely recognise the pyramid but build it from the top down because the higher layers are the most tangible and easily accessible. However our experience shows that working in this way is almost totally guaranteed to fail. This is because each layer is dependent on the layer below being in place and being aligned in purpose, in order to achieve its intended objectives. E.g. any Process requires a compatible Culture in order to succeed. Tools are there to improve the delivery of a compatible Process.

Business Fundamentals

At a foundational level any business only needs to do two things make the thing right, and make the right thing. The only way to be truly successful is to do both in equal measure.

On first hearing the previous statement, many might consider it to be so simple as to be challenging their intelligence, yet almost every day we continue to examples of how many businesses are continuing to fail at this fundamental level. This is particularly true when we see so many organisations falling into the trap of not ‘making the right thing’ – yet there is no bigger error in business than making a product no one wants.

Product/Service Delivery

Many organisations try to transform their entire workforce at the same time using a waterfall programme management approach. We know of no instances where this ‘big bang’ approach has achieved the intended outcome and objectives. The big bang approach fails for many reasons, but there are two main ones.

Firstly, a pre-planned, one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to succeed simply due to the the complex and dynamic response of an organisation of any significant size. Real life organisations respond in an unpredictable way to change, more like an living organism and much less with the predictable, linear machine-like response this approach requires to be successful.

Secondly, most transformations of this type assume total buy-in across 100% of the workforce. In reality many employees see a transformation as a threat to their position and/or job satisfaction – either consciously or unconsciously. Consequently they often react in less than positive ways, which increases the unpredictability of the response, and further limits the chances of success.

Faster Time to Market

While recent focus across many industries has been on ‘making the thing right’, but The Align System builds in the same level of quality control and data driven decision support for both axes so that we continually drive toward the Success quadrant.As in many aspects of The Align System, we build from a simple model, adding complexity as and when needed. Our experience shows that most organisations – for mostly for historical reasons – have extremely brittle and overly long business time-to-market ‘pipelines’ to move from a business idea to a product or service in front of their customers.

These outdated types of ‘pipeline’ are the anti-thesis of business agility, in that not only do they drive up costs and time to market, but also drastically limit an organisation’s ability to respond to change in their marketplace

Consequently The Align System employs a 3 stage ‘chain of why’ that takes us from our original idea – or business hypothesis – efficiently to the actions we take to present our product or service to our customers.

Some additional reading

The cycles we describe below are very similar to the ideas presented by Gojko Adjic in his book ‘Specification by Example’ but we have extended them – particularly to show their applicability beyond the world of IT and software development..

As already suggested, we use Wardley Mapping and Cynefin to guide us at a strategic level in terms of our org design, our build or buy decisions, selecting our key personnel, and choosing the most appropriate working practices.

As guided by the strategy we create from our WM exercise, we may choose to further expand out into more detail some areas – e.g. Clayton Christiansen on ‘Jobs to be done’, BJ Fogg on influencing decisions, SEO research, Growth Hacking for our interaction aspect, or Cloud Architecture, Agile systems, etc., for our Operational Aspects

Cycles of Success

The Align System Hypothesis Cycle

Beginning with the (Business) Hypothesis cycle. We use Impact Mapping to guide us to define the deliverables we will need to provide to our customers for our Business Hypothesis to succeed.

Impact Mapping was chosen since we believe – via the 5 whys – that any business goal can be described in terms of a set of behaviours. These are behavious we want to change or reinforce in our customers (or employees for internal initiatives). This hypothesis cycle will drive one or more behaviour implementation cycles.

The Align System Realisation Cycle

In the realisation cycle we map out the journey that we want our Users to follow in adopting/using our product. Then we use Story Mapping to transform this User Journey into a set of realisation elements that will give structure to our product. We can use Wardley Mapping (and Cynefin) as a secondary tool here to guide in developing a strategy that will put us/ keep us ahead of our competitors.

Each realisation cycle will in turn result in one or more user interaction cycles. However we may choose or need to repeat the Realisation cycle recursively so that we have reached a stage where our User Stories are small enough to be implemented.

The Align System User Interaction Cycle

This is the lowest level of our 3 cycles.

Here we use example mapping to define the tasks we need to execute so that their interactions with our product (or service) encourages them to choose to use our product – i.e. adopt the behaviours set out in our business hypothesis.

The Align System Metrics

Until recently IT departments were – often very justifiably – considered to be among the least successful at project delivery. However over the past few years, many IT departments have turned this reputation around. In doing so they have become often the most successful at delivering what their users’ need. This is due in no small measure to the move to a product – rather than project – focus philosophy. Also to a great extent to the DevOps (see link) ‘revolution’.

We’ll speak more about product mentality later, but for now we’ll look at how the success of DevOps. This success is largely driven by the use of 4 metrics for our operation aspect, –

Number of Deployments
Change Lead Time
Mean Time to Recover
Change Fail Rate

Although these seem only to be applicable to software products, with a little thought these metrics can be applied equally as productively to any product or service.

Number of Deployments

The number of times we provide a new item to our customers – the higher the number the better

Change Lead Time

The length of time it takes us to go from a hypothesis to giving the user the item – the shorter time the better

Mean Time to Recover

How long does it take us to recover from any kind of user failure – the shorter time the better

Change Fail Rate

What percentage of new items fail to ‘hit the spot’ with our customers – the smaller % the better

To these four operational focused metrics we add two interaction focused metrics –

Net Promoter Score

How likely is a customer to refer our product to a friend – higher the better.

Adoption Rate

How quickly do new items achieve the expected adoption by customers.

These metrics have been chosen to avoid the trap we humans usually fall into of being seduced by ‘Vanity’ metrics.

Adopting the Align System ...

We see The Align System as being equally applicable to both new and existing organisations. With new ventures adoption is more straightforward as we can build from scratch. We do not have the transformation overhead, with much less friction in trying to change existing mindsets and paradigms.

... for Start Ups

As we have just stated, start ups don’t have so much friction when it comes to changing the way of working. However there’s often a different kind of friction in a start-up. The sad fact is that more than 90% of new ventures fail. As humans we have difficulty in accepting we are one of the 9 out of 10 who will not succeed and often spend way too much time and effort ‘flogging a dead horse’. The sad fact is that too many ‘entrepreneurs’ take too long to accept the fact that they are in the ‘Business Failure’ quadrant, and that their idea is doomed.

True entrepreneurs recognise it’s more of a numbers game and it’s best to give up on a failure and move onto the next idea. Our system has this approach built in and is geared towards identifying a failing idea at the earliest opportunity, to limit our losses and minimise risk to our investment.

... for Organisational Transformation

With existing organisations, the challenge of transitioning to a new way of working has to be overcome. In our experience this is most often completely underestimated, and misunderstood. Consequently this leads to total mismanagement – often failing at eye wateringly massive expense.

No big bang

Firstly, a pre-planned, one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to succeed simply due to the complex and dynamic response of an organisation of any significant size. Real life organisations respond in an unpredictable way to change, more like an living organism and much less with the predictable, linear machine-like response this approach requires to be successful.

Focused on RoI through talent retention and improved efficiency

Our approach uses proven techniques, such as Theory of Constraints, to grow the transformation from inside. We carefully select change champions from the ranks of those who often feel most threatened. We train and support them to spread the transformation across the business. We use their successes to demonstrate the value of the transformation and gain traction with their previously less eager colleagues.

Using this customised approach, each organisation is free to expand on the basic elements in a way that suits their goals and situation. They use the system to develop their own ‘Agile way’. We believe this approach is more in line with the spirit of Agile. We see value in a generic way of working. Why some organisations might choose a framework such as SAFe or LeSS. We also see that some organisation might choose to copy a snapshot of one successful company’s solution – such as ‘the Spotify Model. However, we see there is more value in starting with surfacing and understanding an organisation’s goals and values. Then using these to guide us in building a customised solution aligned to delivering these specific needs. Building a way of working that is focused on measurable business results and customer and employee satisfaction.

Find out more about the Align System

Are you interested in finding out how The Align System can help you secure the future of your organisation?

Then please email us at enquiries@belcadiblackwood.com

We’ll be happy to arrange a free and confidential initial consultation.

Download a pdf version of this guide here

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