Mailbag Building alignment around a new strategy - Will Larson

This resource first appeared in issue #62 on 19 Feb 2021 and has tags Strategy: Change Management, Strategy: Alignment

Mailbag: Building alignment around a new strategy - Will Larson

This was written in the context of setting a technical strategy within a technical organization, but it works just as well in a context where you’re working with stakeholders and researchers about a product or project strategy.

The approach Larson describes will be familiar from the discussion about “change management” and stopping doing things in #58 - there’s no way around it, it’s labour- and time-consuming. You have to first make sure everyone agrees on the problem, then build towards a solution, and shop that around getting input.

Most of us aren’t working with communities of a size where a working group makes sense - it’s our job to put together an initial solution proposal (or a couple of options), then pre-wire that information, iteratively gathering feedback, getting ready for a presentation where a solution is proposed. But the basic approach is the same. If it sounds like a lot of work, it is! Getting wide agreement about something new, or even worse a change to something old, is genuinely difficult, there’s no way around it.