Alignment

Where it starts

Alignment is the first phase of the Performing Tribes path, and the image that describes it best comes from flying: you fix your position, you set a heading, and then the whole crew knows where the aircraft is going. Before deciding how hard to pull it helps to know where you are and what you’re pointing at.

The most common mistake is skipping it. Someone asks to work on the end objectives without having established the point they’re starting from, and without having said why that objective matters. An objective without those two things around it stays a number to be hit, and gets treated like one.

What comes to the surface

Aligning doesn’t mean making everyone the same. It means the group is looking in the same direction and can find its bearings even in situations nobody had planned for. Building a team that performs takes shared understanding, time to reflect and habits chosen on purpose, and this phase is where all three get built, in a space where people can say what they actually think.

This phase surfaces contradictions that had never been named, and attitudes that taken one at a time look harmless. Those are the ones that months later slow the work down without anybody being able to say where the drag is coming from. It also surfaces the gap between the way things are now and the way the team says it wants them, which is the gap the rest of the path works on.

Five steps, in this order

You work on five things, and the sequence matters, because each one makes the next possible. Around them sit the behaviours the team actually uses, the processes it runs on and the goals it has set itself, and each of the five gets tested against those three.

1. Vision. Where you want to get to. It’s the most abstract level and it comes first, because without it there’s no basis for choosing anything else.
2. Mission. Which game you choose to play inside that direction. It makes the vision concrete and gives everyone a part.
3. Values. The principles you decide by when the instructions run out. They have to be put in order, not just listed.
4. Competences. What you get there with. Here you come down from the plane of intentions to the plane of tools.
5. Climate and environment. The conditions you work in while you’re doing it. It’s the only one of the five that gets attention solely once it has already become a problem.

At the end of those five you look at the company’s leadership model, which is what holds the others together and which decides how decisions get made and communicated.

Then it gets tested

The ideas formulated here stay words until somebody tests them under pressure. That’s why alignment doesn’t close in the training room: the later phases of the path exist to test, with real activities, what this phase declared. What the phase produces is concrete, a shared language for deciding, a set of rituals and checkpoints the team designed itself, and commitments with a name against them.

It’s the moment you find out whether a vision everyone agreed on in words holds up when the group has an objective, a tight clock and nobody telling it how. There’s also a format built exactly for that test, The Pilot Game: half a day in which the team decides in real time, under pressure, and finds out how closely its choices track the values it had just declared.