The World May Be Flat ... But Is it Aligned?
By Kevin J. Fleming, Ph.D.

Some time ago the book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Friedman came out and made quite a stir about how the speed of information technology in business nowadays has leveled the playing field between established and industrial markets. Advances in Internet capabilities, outsourcing, offshoring and other “flatteners” have certainly affected the global arena.

Though the buzz created by the book certainly made sense from an IT perspective, I remember thinking something different when it came out—to me, it brought to the forefront not only competition and market questions, but more philosophically this question: What is the difference between “information” and “knowledge”? That is, despite the advances in speed and connectivity worldwide, wasn’t the rate of knowledge acquisition likely still the same if we can assume human nature and information processing for mastery of material has remained relatively the same? Doesn’t it take a person now relatively the same amount of time to learn calculus as it would a similar IQ person 100 years ago?

And if being “flat” hasn’t helped businesses learn faster, what about some other consequences? Has the speed and abundance (should we say fire hose?) of information brought more of a focus on alignment in decision making and extended it beyond the CIO purview into a broader range of business perspectives? I believe it has. As an executive coach, I am pummeled by the awareness that in nearly every individual performance question there lays an alignment problem to solve.

An innovative company called SchellingPoint has embarked on a fascinating journey to do something about this traditionally intangible and unmanageable, yet business-critical topic. Led by co-founders Mike Taylor and Tim Chambers, this company has combined and codified Nobel Prize winning teachings of Thomas Schelling, Harvard Professor Chris Argyris and others into computer-assisted software processes to rapidly quantify, pinpoint and reconcile the areas of convergence and divergence within groups.

I have begun formally partnering with this company in an attempt to provide what will surely become a best practice—integrating both the collective and individual parts of organizational thinking to realize the fuller potential of collaborative action. Below are SchellingPoint’s key areas critical to begin this alignment and integration question that your organization’s speed and abundance of information delivery may be convoluting inadvertently:

1. Clarity of Destination When engaging in any collaborative or team activity, the information you’ve gathered or were exposed to will drive your views of four crucial factors:

How you view your current situation.

The changes and new outcomes you feel the collaboration should make happen.

The issues it’ll have getting from here to there.

The potential side effects of making it happen.

Is your thinking driven by the same information your colleagues are? Would you process the same data into the same meaning even if it where?

Too many business activities are driven from grand themes and platitudes, great intent condensed to something attractive no one could possibly argue with. We’ve declared it therefore we’re aligned, it will happen...just execute. Sometimes we need to surface not only the behavioral components, but also the assumptions and interpretations of a team. These may have been reached tacitly, yet any areas of misalignment at the action level are often the root cause of sub-optimal outcomes.

2. Degree of Alignment Modern business dialogues regularly question whether one is on the bus or “off it” in following the corporate mission, the values statement and the programs intended to implement it. But is alignment a binary thing? Or rather is it vast gray spectrum with varying percentages or degrees of agreement? If so, if you are the CEO, wouldn’t you want to know the concrete details around the degree of alignment in your company? Misalignment leads to wasted time and effort; misalignment that remains hidden by our need to be seen to be on the bus.

3. Level of Collaboration While many companies love brainstorming sessions to put creative ideas on the table, many team members use these occurrences to mean that the air of open discussion to differing ideas and opinions “hold throughout” the life of a team. Sadly, there is a honeymoon phase to open discussions of teams and we quickly realize that it may be unsafe to share conflicting views. I’m probably the only one thinking this, if I say this I may look foolish, my boss might not think I get it. Do these views go away? No, they usually morph into forms of well-intended action and inaction that’s rarely uncovered, much less leveraged into the formation of the plan.

You’ve always had access to coaches like me to understand the reasoning, and improve the actions of individuals. You now have the means to access the reasoning of the collective group and maximize its alignment—rarely achieved until SchellingPoint makes one plus one equal three.

This is an excerpt from an upcoming book to be released by Random House’s self-publishing in summer 2007. This is the intellectual property solely of Dr. Kevin Fleming and no reproduction or duplication of this material is permissible without consent.

This is the intellectual property solely of Dr. Kevin Fleming and no reproduction or duplication of this material is permissible without consent.