Tuesday, March 29, 2022

HOW TO REACH ALIGNMENT BETWEEN STAKEHOLDERS AND YOUR CREATIVE TEAM. HINT: IT STARTS AND ENDS WITH COMMUNICATION

 by Kevin Williams

It’s a typical Wednesday, and you’ve just received another email from a stakeholder who wants to know the status of their creative project. On top of that, they’re wondering if there’s any way you can deliver their collateral by Friday. Meanwhile, you know your creative team is struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for content. You’ve already touched base with them on behalf of this stakeholder several times. You know they’re making good progress, but also know there’s no way they can complete this project by Friday.

As a project manager, you want to add value to the creative process. Yet too often, you may feel like you’re spinning your wheels while keeping track of endless details and running interference between stakeholders and creatives. If that’s the case, it’s time for a change.

Good news: You have the power to make improvements to your process that will give your stakeholders a just-right, strategically focused end result in less time. What’s more, you can do so while simultaneously improving the morale and productivity of your creative team.

It all comes down to communication.

Communicate Strategically to Reach Alignment at Project Kickoff

All creative teams have some process for gathering information. For example, a request intake form might ask stakeholders to check boxes for the types of collateral they need. Need a video? Complete this section of the form. Want a large banner? Tell us when you need it and for what purpose.

This information gathering is important and necessary, but true communication relies on deeper conversations. Effective, two-way communication leads to alignment between stakeholders and creatives, which in turn streamlines the content lifecycle and improves content outcomes.

Follow these guidelines at kickoff to truly reach alignment.

Understand Your Stakeholder’s Strategic Business Goals

Kick off your engagement by having stakeholders complete a creative brief that  thoroughly lays out their business objectives and serves as a guide for the creative team.

Stakeholders may not have thought their project all the way through from a big-picture perspective. The creative brief should answer questions like:

  • What is the vision for and purpose of this project?
  • What are the goals you are trying to reach through this piece?
  • How does this collateral fit in with other projects you’re currently working on?
  • Have you defined what a successful outcome looks like? If so, how will you measure success?
  • Who is your intended audience?
  • Have you created anything like this before? Is there anything we should know about how that went?
  • How quickly are you expecting to receive a final product?

Help your stakeholders clearly define their needs and expectations at the onset. Remember, they don’t know what they don’t know — and they also don’t know what you need to know! Proactively draw out the information you need.

Establish Realistic Expectations

Just like you need information from stakeholders, stakeholders appreciate having a clear sense of what to expect from your creative team. Use the kickoff meeting to provide an overview of your creative process, set realistic workflows and deadlines, and educate stakeholders about their role in reviewing proofs and providing feedback.

If you are using a robust workflow management system , this is the time to train your stakeholders on how to use the system and provide them with access to their project so they can track progress as needed.

Evaluate Ongoing Project Requests Before They Reach the Creative Team

Sometimes clear communication begins with a simple yes or no. That’s why it’s important to evaluate ongoing project requests before they are assigned. Whether you are the one to review each submission, or whether you appoint someone else to serve as a “traffic manager,” someone needs to vet requests to determine if they are feasible, reasonable, and well-defined.

This sounds like a no-brainer, but in reality, most workflow management softwares skip this step and go straight to assignment. This can lead to wasted time and added frustration for your creative team, particularly if a request is submitted for work that doesn’t merit their limited time.

Keep Stakeholders Informed throughout the Creative Process

When a project is underway, you’re likely to face two extremes. Stakeholders will either ask you for constant progress reports and updates, or you’ll have to chase them down to obtain the answers or feedback your creative team needs to keep the project on track.

Obviously neither is ideal, but you can achieve balance by providing stakeholders with an appropriate level of access to your team’s creative process. For example, you might create a virtual Kanban board that gives stakeholders a visual overview of live statuses for each piece of the project. This quickly shows viewers what is in process, what has moved into a later stage of production, and whether the entire project is on track.

For the stakeholders you are always tracking down, set automated reminders within your workflow management system to alert them when they are behind on their part of the process.

A flexible and scalable workflow management system can keep stakeholders engaged while also protecting creatives from receiving too much input or oversight (you don’t want stakeholders weighing in on early drafts, for instance). Software features such as defined roles, review tiers, and levels of access give stakeholders right-timed, need-to-know information and free you up to focus on keeping the project moving forward rather than answering endless status requests.

Closing the Communication Loop During Review and Approval

If you’ve communicated openly and clearly along the way, your team has created high-quality work that is strategically focused and aligned with overarching expectations. However, that doesn’t mean the proof will immediately be approved with no changes. Therefore, it’s important to ask for thoughtful actionable feedback that moves beyond a simple “love it” or “hate it” response.

To make this part of the process efficient and effective, use a workflow software that eliminates the need for back-and-forth feedback via email or Slack. Good software should offer the ability to react to a proof directly on the asset. For instance, if reviewing a video, stakeholders should be able to timestamp the exact 30 seconds they want to alter. Likewise, when evaluating messaging, they should be free to comment, edit, highlight, and move paragraphs around quickly and easily.

This kind of direct, clear, tangible feedback will enable creative teams to deliver a final result that meets your stakeholder’s overarching objectives — and because they have had the opportunity to provide valuable feedback throughout the process, there will be fewer misfires along the way.

Manage Your Project Toward Communication-Driven Results

Successful, impactful creative projects start with you. As a project manager, you have the responsibility and opportunity to create processes and workflows that effectively serve all the players involved. It begins with communication, leads to alignment around the strategic objectives and goals your stakeholders are trying to reach, and ends with tangible results.

Organizational Lifecycles

 






by Dave Hanna

“There is the Moral of all human tales;

‘Tis but the same rehearsal of the past.

First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails,

Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last.

And History, with all her volumes vast,

Hath but one page.”

—Lord Byron




Many corporations (and industries) are struggling to survive in a rapidly changing global marketplace. While we may think our struggles today are unique, a review of the big picture of organizational lifecycles reveals that we are in the middle of the latest iteration of a consistent pattern of business dynamics that has defined survival for centuries.

As we consider the big picture, think about what the following companies have in common:

  • Cambria Steel
  • Guggenheim Exploration
  • Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre Coal
  • Intercontinental Rubber
  • Schwarzchild and Sulzberger
  • Central Leather

Each of these institutions was one of the top 100 U.S. firms in 19091, but none exists today as an independent entity. They are either out of business or a very minor player in some larger corporation. Some were quite large in their glory days (Central Leather was number seven on the 1909 list). Unfortunately they were not able to maintain their success. In a few management generations they have disappeared. These six are certainly not unusual: of the top 100 U.S. industrial firms in 1909, only 14 are still in the elite group today. Only 23 are still around at all!

To update this picture I considered today’s Fortune Magazine’s Global Top 100 list. The resulting table is most instructive:


The left column lists some representative leaders in the Global 100. The right column identifies some well-known companies who fell off of the list during the decade of the 2000s. These companies were not alone. In fact, 54 of the Top 100 fell of the list during the 2000s. Going back to the original list of 1909, a review of the Top 100 during the decade 1909-1919 shows 59 of those companies fell off the list. So, we can see that regardless of the era, staying on top of the pack is hard to do.

Consider further the reasons the companies fell off the list from 1909-1919:

  1. Changing economic conditions
  2. Mergers and acquisitions
  3. Emergence of new technologies.

So what has changed in 100 years? Not much. Roughly 50% of the Top 100 fall within 10 years for the same fundamental reasons. This common pattern for the past century indicates there are some systemic forces at play here, not just a series of coincidences or random events.

AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

The struggle for life isn’t something peculiar to large corporations. The Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) reports that 99.8 percent of new employer establishments are small firms. The 2008 Bureau of the Census report for the SBA indicated 64 percent of new firms survived two years, 45 percent survived five years, but only 29 percent http://cialis7pharmacy-online.com/ survived 10 years.

ORGANIZATIONAL LIFECYCLES

The common pattern from the Top 100 research and the SBA findings is illustrated by this lifecycle graphic. Though one organization may extend its peak phase more than others, most organizations’ bottom line over time looks like this familiar bell-shaped curve:

The lifecycle tells us that whenever people come together, certain dynamics tend to emerge. They unite themselves and grow. Then something happens and they decay over time. Yet organizations are the only living systems that have the potential to live on   indefinitely. They don’t have to follow the up-and-down slope of the lifecycle.





In order to know what to do to extend an organization’s lifecycle, we first need to better understand its dynamics. What accompanies an organization’s rise to peak performance? What drags it down? What must leaders keep in mind if they are to stand the test of time? To answer these questions, let’s consider two organizational applications—the lifecycles of civilizations and product innovations. Both are extremely relevant to our present society and global economy. My intent in reviewing these lifecycles is not to make you a social anthropologist or research scientist. Examining their common patterns can help us better understand the natural laws and principles that govern both the ascent and descent of complex organizations. What follows is a summary of thousands of years of human experience as documented by renowned historians. As you read this material, see if you can determine why, as Arnold Toynbee said, “Nothing fails like

LIFECYCLES OF CIVILIZATIONS

The world’s great civilizations such as those in Sumer, Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, China, and Mesoamerica all share a common lifecycle: they started from almost nothing, flourished, declined, and then either disappeared or lingered on as shadows of their former selves as others overtook them. German historian Robert Münzel summed it up best, “Great nations rise and fall—the people go from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back again into bondage.”


Building on this description, I offer this lifecycle with the following nine stages:

 

THE CIVILIZATION LIFECYCLE

  1. Bondage: all great civilizations start in bondage to others and either overthrow another group or emigrate to a new home. One key to moving out of bondage is tribal loyalty. The tribe is one, characterized by equality of duty.
  2. Faith: moral or religious faith has accompanied the early rise of each civilization. The element of faith provides an overarching value system to which individual desires are subordinated.
  3. Courage: all members courageously pursue the group’s objectives to protect themselves from enemies and to expand their culture.
  4. Community: city-states often expand the tribal loyalty to ever-wider circles of followers. Common values make citizenship a personal and fulfilling experience even as the population grows.
  5. Abundance: each civilization reaches a point where it becomes the envy of its neighbors. Abundance means there is plenty for everyone; that the quality of life is high for most people and not artificially constrained.
  6. Selfishness: The overarching set of values dissipates, enabling the people to glorify themselves and gratify their own desires. Divisions in beliefs and wealth become more pronounced. Cooperation breaks down.
  7. Greed: the quest for self-gratification leads to greater materialism and an ever increasing escalation of exploiting other groups for the benefit of a select few. Said one historian, “Wealth corrupts, not immediately, but invariably.”
  8. Dependence: inequality grows with greed, bringing a division between an advantaged minority and a deprived majority. Ironically, the civilization becomes dependent on its weakest link for further progress.
  9. Bondage: weakened civilizations eventually give way to other groups. Thus the lifecycle comes full circle: from bondage to bondage; or, in Byron’s words, “a rehearsal of the past.”

From the writings of Will and Ariel Durant, Emile Durkheim, Neville Kirk, Albert Schweitzer, Adam Seligman, Pitirim A. Sorokin, Oswald Spengler, Alexis de Tocqueville, Arnold Toynbee, and George M. Wrong emerge the following characteristics of a declining civilization:

WHAT BRINGS DOWN A CIVILIZATION?

  • A declining sense of community and national pride (evidenced by political apathy) as people become more concerned with only their own private affairs [selfishness]
  • A preponderance of great cities
  • A worship of money and material wealth [greed]
  • Religious values replaced by disparate and contending secular values and a resulting moral confusion
  • A lack of emphasis on the family, marriage, and the proper training of children, leading to further moral and social fragmentation
  • The rise of dictators
  • A cumulative weakness and chaos in the social fabric that leaves the population open to exploitation and/or decimation [dependence/bondage]

The dynamics of this civilization lifecycle are profound because they transcend individual people, cultures, and even epochs of time. Every civilization is in fact an organization—a group of people working toward some common purpose over time. Pause for a moment and think of your organization as if it were one of the great civilizations. At which point in this lifecycle does your organization find itself? Are you ascending, on top, or sliding downhill? Do these attributes describe where your culture has come from, where it is now, and where the current trends will lead you?

THE PRODUCT LIFECYCLE

The civilization lifecycle closely resembles another lifecycle—that of the product innovation process. The rise and fall of today’s industrial organizations are due to dynamics that are very similar to those of civilizations. The lifecycle of developing innovative goods and services looks like this:




THE PRODUCT LIFECYCLE

  1. Debt: The initial context for all innovations is debt, meaning they are dependent on other organizational resources for their sponsorship and execution.
  2. Vision: Every innovation is sparked by a vision of a better solution (product, technology, or service) to someone’s need. The computer and overnight courier services both began as some individual’s vision of a better world.
  3. Persistence: Persistence is required by the innovator (often referred to as a product champion) to move the vision to reality against a tide of opposition from the status quo.
  4. Divergence: This stage calls for experimentation to test the validity of the concept by exploring different alternatives without prematurely judging any as “good” or “bad.”
  5. Convergence: out of the many options previously explored, a single prototype is selected to introduce into the market place. Now all of the organization’s departments must converge for the product launch.
  6. Market Share: A period of growth. The market evaluates the new innovation and determines its relative value compared to other available offerings. Abundance follows when the desired market share is realized.
  7. Inward Focus: Prosperity brings with it a greater emphasis on internal issues: production costs, economies of scale and standardization to minimize the cost of  expansion and stabilize the product’s quality and reliability.
  8. Win-Lose Strategy: as others imitate the new innovation, the focus subtly drifts toward the competitive battle and away from the customer. Win-Lose strategies emerge, attempting to maximize self-interests vs. competition.
  9. Follow Competition: the inward focus, at a time when competing products are introduced and consumer expectations are being reshaped, results in a loss of the competitive edge. The innovator now becomes a follower.
  10. Out of Business: the product dies or is replaced by a newer form. This newer form may come from within its own organization or from competition.

Think of how we got the light bulb, penicillin, the newest electronic invention and countless other items that contribute to our standard of living. In each case the product lifecycle dynamics have been evident. Think further about companies, products or services that have become obsolete. Again the lifecycle has been conspicuous as carriages gave way to automobiles, phonograph records have been largely replaced by compact discs, streaming and iTunes, and conventional mail services have been displaced largely by the internet.

Again I invite you to place your own product or service where you think it fits today on the product lifecycle. Are you just approaching the desired market share, already at the top, or falling from where you used to be?

Consider for a moment the common threads revealed in these two lifecycles—and what lessons you can apply from them to your own situation:




The similarities are striking and pose some serious questions. Why is it that with all our technical advances, with our unparalleled capacity to learn and store knowledge, with the coming of reengineering, balanced scorecards, quality and reliability management and sophisticated strategic planning methods—why is it with all this going for us we are unable to build organizations that can hold up over time? One wonders if any system can survive more than a few decades…

There is a light at the end of this tunnel. Organizations do have the potential to “jump the curve” and avoid the downward plunge. See the related article on this blog “The Organizational Survival Code” in which I explore the other half of the big picture—the survival code that will enable your organization to break out of the lifecycle’s fatal spell.

 

1A. D. H. Kaplan study in Big Enterprise in a Competitive System, Brookings Institution, 1954

2Fortune Magazine’s list of the 500 largest global companies, ranked by revenue, 2009 and 2020


Designing For “Extreme Alignment”

 

by Dave Hanna


Designing for Extreme Alignment From the Outside-In




Here is a design process that builds upon the survival code principles and mindset shifts for extreme alignment:

Step 1: Develop Extreme Alignment With Stakeholders (Internal And External)

The suitability and survival of any organization lies in the eyes of its different stakeholders. The proposition is very straightforward: deliver to the most critical stakeholders what they need most, do it better than competitors, and you will have all the business you want. Failing to do so opens the door for those stakeholders to find better options:

  •  Investors will look elsewhere for better returns on their investments.
  •  Customers will try competitors’ products.
  • Enterprises that provide superior service will draw away your customers.
  • Dissatisfied associates will look for new employment.

Extreme alignment with each stakeholder group begins with your mindset.You must seriously “Think Win-Win” as my mentor Stephen R. Covey has said.You must make it your business to fulfill the stakeholder’s most critical needs. Not necessarily every need, but the ones that would make or break their commitment to you. And they must be able to meet your most critical needs, such as honoring contracts, making timely payments for your products/services, and coming together as partners when problems arise (on either side).

Meeting the stakeholder’s most critical needs may cost you time, money, and resources. This will have an impact on today’s profitability. Some companies try to shortcut their deliverables to boost their own profit picture. But how is their profit picture affected if the dissatisfied customer abandons them altogether? And what message does this send to other stakeholders?

Is this just a philosophical caution? Ask Company Z.

Company Z had been losing market share and profitability for some years. In a desperate attempt to halt the slide, they demanded all suppliers to tear up their business contracts and revise them at no more than 80 per cent of the original, agreed-upon amount. 


The suppliers swallowed hard and signed the new contracts.This brought billions of dollars to Company Z’s bottom line that fiscal year.

A few years later Company Z worked with its union to finalize a new union contract. The discussions became very difficult and heated. The union demanded Company Z include even the most specific details in the new contract. Threats were exchanged. In the end, the union called for a labor strike and shut down all of Company Z’s manufacturing facilities. Discussions continued, and the strike finally ended after many, many weeks. The revenues lost during the strike were greater than the money saved from tearing up the suppliers’ contracts.

Do you suppose the union leaders were distrustful of management’s promises to them after observing what happened to the suppliers?

So, survival does depend on how well you fulfill stakeholders’ critical needs. This being so, it seems logical that you would have a stakeholder information system at least as thorough as any financial information system or product research system. What elements would such a stakeholder information system have? How about:

  •  Clear identification of the results (“deliverables”) each partner should contribute
  •  Expectations of what I call the “do’s and don’ts” – standards of behaviors when working together
  •  Resources each partner will dedicate to meet expectations and to deliver the results.
  •  Monitoring of progress: agreement on how often and in what format to report progress to each other.

What This Looks Like in the Real World: Ritz-Carlton Hotels

No doubt you have heard of the legendary customer service at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, a consistent leader in the hotel industry and the only two-time winner of the Baldrige National Quality Award in the service industry. Though many have heard some Ritz-Carlton stories, very few understand how such extreme alignment to


1.  The Credo: notice how it focuses on specific guest needs and associates’ priorities for fulfilling those needs:






2.  18 Core Processes: each core process is designed to fulfill important guest needs derived from the Credo; everything from making a reservation, to any aspect of the hotel stay, to departure – and beyond. All systems, processes, and associate interactions that define the guest experience are supervised by Ritz-Carlton associates themselves.

3.  The Bottom Line: excellence in the company’s performance is defined through the eyes of three main stakeholder groups:

  •   Happy Associates: in an industry where employee turnover averages 100 per cent per year, Ritz-Carlton’s turnover is approximately one third of that average.
  •   Happy Guests: average occupancy rates at Ritz-Carlton are far above industry average; guest engagement scores are above 90 per cent in Gallup research.
  •   Happy Owners: every Ritz-Carlton property is owned by a third-party investor. With very few exceptions, these owners are happy with their Return On Investment.

 

4.  Continuous Improvement: each year each hotel recommends how to improve one of the 18 core processes. Submissions come into headquarters and the best ideas are turned into company wide actions. These improvements invariably improve the experience for both guests and associates.

Ritz-Carlton shows us that an outside-in alignment to “make your business my business” enriches the well-being of all stakeholders.



Step 2: Craft Extreme Alignment Between Associates And Their Work

Even the best of stakeholder agreements represents only a statement of good intentions. Success only emerges from how aligned the different players are in making good on their intentions.The process of extreme alignment between associates, stakeholders, and their joint work looks something like this:

  •  All associates in the organization are aware of and committed to fulfilling their key stakeholders’ needs. The metaphor for this alignment is to “make their business our business.” Making this mantra more than a mere slogan requires extreme alignment of the players’ underlying values, skills, and energy as well as sufficient resources from the entire organization.
  • “Making their business our business” launches a new organization design process. Much organization design work today begins by considering the company’s strategy, its chosen products and services, and then organizes functions, departments, and individual job responsibilities to win in the marketplace.This is an inside-out design process.But the aim to make a stakeholder’s business your business must be approached from the outside-in. Organization designers must shape an Organizational Capillary (like the filtration scientists cited earlier), a designed channel to be “extremely aligned” to fulfill stakeholder needs while filtering out distracting “impurities.”

Here is a graphic representation of how this works: 




The output of this “capillary” is a product or service that fulfills the stakeholder’s needs.Any function or activity that tangibly contributes value to this output is channeled through the capillary. Some of these might include:

  •  Timely, quality interactions and reciprocal feedback with the stakeholder
  •  Creation of products and/or services that the stakeholder values
  •  Organizing processes and systems from support functions to core operations and individual tasks to deliver the required outputs.


  • The new design must filter out any “impurities” or distractions that might compromise the desired output. Such factors are illustrated in the gray elements of the graphic. For example:
  1. **Current job procedures and work systems may need to be stopped or revised.
  2. ** “Top-down” leadership preferences may need to be redesigned to permit skilled, responsible decisions at the point of action.
  3. **Functional silos may need to be supplemented by cross-functional structures for work that requires a high level of collaboration.
  4. **Policies or operating rules may need to be revised.
  5. ** Work culture norms, such as beliefs that “we’re good enough” or “Not Invented Here” may need to be eliminated or upgraded.
  •  The new design must be supported by training and development systems to equip associates to function competently and effectively in the new organization. Some examples:
  1.   If associates are expected to be able to solve any daily problem they face, they must be given the knowledge, tools, and skills to do so.
  2.   If teamwork and collaboration are imperative for some tasks, some training in collaborative skills might be warranted.
  3.   If high flexibility and responsiveness are required, the development of multi-skilled associates has proven to be essential.
  4.   Most likely, some new processes and systems between the organization and some stakeholders will need to be designed jointly.

  • Generally speaking, the bureaucratic leadership artifacts of yesterday must be retired. Such artifacts as:
  1.    Control only by supervision

  2.    Steep hierarchical levels

  3.    Preoccupation with spans of control 

  4.    Exclusive centralized decision making


  • Other bureaucratic artifacts about the organization of work must likewise be retired in favor of swifter, more flexible capabilities. Some of these transitions include:
  1.  “The job” must be upgraded to “our roles” in the spirit of any associate can and will be able to do a number of different things when necessary to deliver the required outputs.
  2.   Sharing some traditional leadership responsibilities to put decision making closer to the points of action.
  3.   Institutionalizing teaming as a way of life to produce 3600 synergistic collaboration

The result of all these organizational elements is a corporate map (see diagram below):

Legend.   

      Design Capillary between the Organization and each stakeholder representing mutual needs. 





Corporate Function




Stakeholder needs for each corporate unit




Key Points

  1. The organization (and each of its subsystems) must address a diverse set of very important stakeholder needs.
  2. Some of these needs may have the same effect on all subsystems. Common design features may be suitable to address these.
  3. Some of these needs will impact different subsystems differently. Such subsystems may require different and unique organizational and interaction processes and tools.

How the flow of design “capillaries” affects an organization




A more simplified view of the previous graphic is to show how one stakeholder’s needs/requirements for the organization should flow through the organization like the bloodstream flowing through the body. (See below.)

  • The needs should connect with all subsystems and provoke a conscious reaction of (a) to respond to them or (b) to ignore them.
  • Once all actionable needs (from all stakeholders) have been logged into every function, that function should re-posture its purpose and organizational elements to be extremely aligned with those needs.
  • Turning up the organizational microscope, the functions must extremely align their response to their stakeholder needs. The best “streaming device” I have seen to deliver such a response is a multi-functional team (a mini-version of the parent organization), specifically designed and outfitted to be extremely aligned with the stakeholder’s needs. Below is a graphic illustration of the this mini-company: 





What This Looks Like in the Real World: Leaderless Teams in Silicon Valley

(This is an experience my friend Ord Elliott had in Silicon Valley.) A network storage company (let’s call it StorServ) faced a brutal corporate life-or-death challenge. In six months, a competitor was coming out with a new server that had performance and features that would surely obsolete StorServ’s current product.Although a new product was in the works, their typical product development rollout history was thirteen months from concept to product.

The company was functionally fragmented into many different departments.The next generation product needed an array of new features to meet the next competitive bar. The construction of these new features, however, could not be easily accomplished without dialog and tradeoffs across the functional boundaries.

StorServ formed 25 cross-functional teams composed of hardware and software engineers, along with associates from marketing, operations, and finance. Each team was charged with building one of the features as part of the new product architecture.





The teams’ challenges were: (1) very few individuals on these teams had any leadership experience and (2) to achieve milestones in one team, there might be trade-offs or choices with other teams that would have to adjust to—or perhaps block–in favor of their own objective. How would these teams be able to work together under time pressure successfully and, just as importantly, coordinate and negotiate tradeoffs with the other teams?




Out of desperation came a wild idea: instead of considering the leadership function as one person’s responsibility, why not see if different team members could lead one, two, or even three items?

Most teams identified three or four people who, collectively, could provide the needed leadership. Ironically, the very lack of capable leaders allowed for this unorthodox solution.

These new teams were disconnected from the stable, functional organization that spawned it. This loose network seemed more like a separate company.

The teams correctly determined which of the other teams they needed to interface with. The chosen “connectors” were successful in bridging overlaps and differences to work out practical compromises in the interests of the larger objective.





Three-and-a-half months passed.And they delivered a new superior product! Not only did they surpass their “unrealistic” goal of five months, they absolutely destroyed the previous product development best of thirteen months. Ultimately, they would beat the competitors to the marketplace, and more importantly, save all those jobs.

When done with atomic-scale precision, aligning people, work, and stakeholder needs yields the reality of “The needs of the people and the company are inseparable.”