Alignment and autonomy - it needs to be a mess

A few weeks ago, I wrote a short LinkedIn post on alignment and autonomy as being a polarity and not an either-or situation. I got good feedback and reflections on this. Below I will explain my reasoning on why I view these as a polarity to each other and more how to find strategies to get into a “both and” perspective suitable needed for polarities.

Alignment and Autonomy are critical areas within a company:

Autonomy is vital as it allows employees to make decisions and steer their work. This independence can spur innovation and quick adaptation to change, boosting motivation.

Alignment is crucial in a company it ensures that everyone understands and works towards the same strategic objectives, leading to clear direction, improved efficiency, and focused decision-making.

But they are also often in combat with each other, this happens when you apply an either or thinking to them. By instead viewing them as polarities and making use of Polarity Management, we can find strategies that will be helpful for us in our leadership.

Polarity Management is a framework used to deal with issues that are ongoing, interdependent, and have no final solution. These are often referred to as "unsolvable problems" because they are based on values that are in tension with each other, yet both are necessary for a successful outcome.

Polarity management would involve recognizing that Alignment and Autonomy are two poles of a continuum, both of which are necessary for the organization's health and success. 

Let us put alignment and autonomy on the polarity map as presented in the picture below. When reading the picture, you will find my proposed "action steps" and "early warnings" to be aware of for each polarity.

On the left side, we have Autonomy and its connected  "action steps" that will help to increase autonomy and the "early warnings" that we need to be aware of so that we can mitigate negative aspects of autonomy. We mitigate using "action steps" on the Alignment side. Here, we also have "early warnings" that we need to be aware of, which, in turn, can be mitigated by actions on the Autonomy side, and so it continues when we manage to create a good harmony between the two.

So, for example, we can see that an early warning for going too dominant on autonomy is "working in silos," making the communication on vision and goals, and establishing transparent goal-setting frameworks can help to mitigate those negative effects on autonomy.

On the other hand, an early warning for too dominant alignment is that one can see an escalation of decisions moving higher and higher into the hierarchical ladder of the organization. This can be mitigated by empowering decision-making, such as consent decision-making.

Polarity Management can be used in many other types of polarities...

• Short-term vs. Long-term Focus: Navigating between focusing on immediate results and quick wins (short-term focus) and investing in long-term goals and strategies (long-term focus).

• Profit vs. Purpose: Managing the polarity between focusing on profitability and financial success (profit) and staying true to the company's mission and values (purpose).

• Planning vs. Action: Balancing thorough, careful planning against the need to take swift action and be adaptable.

• Innovation vs. Operational Efficiency: Managing the tension between fostering innovation and creativity against the need to maintain efficient, reliable operations.

....just to name a few. Depending on your own situation and needs, the action steps and the early warnings can be different so my suggestion is to build your own set of polarity management maps and get a better understanding of the strategies that you need to develop so that actions you take enhance the different polarities and not cancel each other out or even worse, deteriorate the other polarity.

If would like to have a template to try it out, we have one ready for you at this location:

• Polarity Management Template

What to do with bad apples

Ever heard of the expression “one bad apple can spoil the barrel”? It came up during a class in the Agile People Coach at #agilepeople that Im attending right now, great inspirations, learnings and discussion there by the way :).

The expression states that one apple can corrupt or destroy the whole barrel. I think that this analogy for team och organisations is sometimes useful but as always it only catches one perspective or in this case a glimpse of a perspective. At the discussion a fellow participant Richard Svarre said “But what if it’s the barrel that is bad?” referring to the system. I felt that wow now I got a new perspective of an already existing expression and of course I had to make that into a bloggtoon, I hope you like it.

The power of a story

To understand a system you need the stories in the system, it is these stories that makes it possible for us to navigate in the system, may it be the company you are working in, the community you are in or your own family, any system that we are interacting within. The stories are what makes us understand and feel the culture of the system. But what happens when we encounter stories that is not longer valid, maybe they are so old that it is not possible to understand them anymore, we lost the context of where they where created.

Here is an old Swedish story from Österlen in Skåne, first in Swedish and then an attempt on translating:

“De fostras upp i kobläddor och är en halv näve långa, de är röda och i ena änden är det ett kattahuve och i andra ett hungahuve. Blir man biden av en sån så dör man, såna har jag slagit ihjäl många.”

“They are raised in cowpat and are half a fist long, they are red and at one end it is a cat head and at the other a scoundrels head. If you are bitten by someone like that, you die, I have killed many.”

For most of us this is not easy to decipher and understand. We do not have the context nor the vocabulary needed and this is the case in all systems. Stories that are alive and valid change to make the point that they are supposed to but sometimes they freeze. What was once true and important turns stale and becomes an invalid old truth. But that doesn’t mean that they are buried and forgotten, they can still live there in a zombie like state affecting and blocking the system. I guess most of you have heard a story that starts or ends like this “we have already tried that….”. What is needed is the will to understand, question and change. A god way of doing that is to use the pattern from Sociocracy 3.0 called Navigate via tension. In brief it is a way to make use of tensions in order to understand and to modify the system bit by bit so that it eventually fit better to the need and purpose of those within the system.