0307. Aligned at the Top, Lost at the Bottom

Most organizations believe they have alignment. The strategy is written, the leadership team is on the same page, and everyone knows the goal. But what happens on Monday morning, when the teams spread out and the work actually begins?

In this episode of Lean by Design, Oscar Gonzalez and Lawrence Wong explore why alignment at the top of an organization rarely guarantees coordination at the execution level and why that gap is quietly responsible for some of the most costly breakdowns in cross-functional projects.

The conversation reframes a common assumption: strategy and execution are not the same problem. Research shows that while 82% of executives report being aligned on strategy, actual measured alignment sits closer to 23%. And 67% of well-formulated strategies still fail, not because the strategy was wrong, but because of what happened in the space between the plan and the work.

Oscar and Lawrence unpack the patterns that drive this disconnect: tactical priorities that are assumed rather than defined, dependencies that only become visible when they cause a crisis, cross-functional teams operating without a shared understanding of sequencing, and the kind of over-communication that strong project managers practice but organizations rarely build into their design.

This episode is not about strategy frameworks or planning methodologies. It's about recognizing that alignment should not feel like a meeting outcome, it should be how an organization operates. And why closing the gap between what leadership agrees to and what teams actually execute is one of the most underestimated levers in any organization.

Episode sound familiar? Reach out for a 30 min situation read so that we can look at your situation together. https://sigmalabconsulting.com/call

Learn more about us by visiting:  https://sigmalabconsulting.com/

Order Predictably Broken Now! https://books2read.com/predictablybroken

Check out video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@LeanByDesignPodcast

Want our thoughts on a specific topic? Looking to sponsor this podcast to continue to generate content? Or maybe you have an idea and want to be on our show. Fill out our Interest Form and share your thoughts.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We're back with another episode of Lean by Design Podcast. Oscar Gonzalez here, alongside my co-host Lawrence Wong. Today we're going to talk about something I think that a lot of us have felt at varying levels of our careers, whether you're in biopharma, another regulated industry, or just even in an organization that has multiple layers of management and personnel. And that's when the strategy is clear from the perspective of we've written it down, we've talked about it, we know the strategy of what we're going to be doing in this next year. But the tactical priorities are not. And what I mean by that is that the actual steps you are going to take to execute that strategy are often not aligned. So we're in a situation where dependencies are implicit. We know that the regulatory

Why Strategy Still Fails

SPEAKER_00 1:01

group is responsible for X. The clinical group has to execute on these on these items. Everyone on the team knows what they need to do, but for some reason the project does not execute in the way we thought it would. It's not as smooth as what we thought. We find ourselves in a position where there's this alignment at the top of the organization with the leaders. But we, I think, have found out that that does not always guarantee coordination at the execution level, especially when you're working on cross-functional projects where you have multiple functions that are involved, multiple departments and specialties that are involved to execute a given project, where those teams may change over time and as time goes, especially through the drug development process. There's uh Lawrence, I'm gonna I'm gonna read a couple of uh a couple of uh research metrics that I found being cited sort of everywhere, and and a lot of these point back to Harvard Business Review articles, which I love to read. They do really good research and they really important work that we don't always take advantage of to understand and to learn about. In in a Harvard Business Review analysis, uh there they showed that executives self-report an 80-tope alignment with strategy. But the actual measured alignment was around 23%, which is uh this sort of perception gap that leadership says we're completely aligned, and then when you have these conversations with individual contributors, they feel lost. 83 per 82 percent versus 23 percent. That is a huge gap. There was another review, another article. This was back in 2017, but it's still cited

The Alignment Gap In Data

SPEAKER_00 2:55

by many, where uh they found that 67 of well-formulated strategies fail. So there's some issue here behind what's presented on a slide deck and what happens on Monday morning. When the teams take off and the groups go on to create their work for the following year, for the following uh reporting cycle, and they don't seem to align. 35% of CEOs, this was a PMI study in 2025. 35% of CEOs cite that the planning execution disconnect is their biggest barrier to reinvention, ahead of capital, technology, or even talent. So we find ourselves in these very complex industries with a lot of money at play, with a lot of technology, proprietary data, information, projects that are spanning the entire organization that are using resources from all over the organization. Yet the strategy that we go in with and that we agreed to doesn't quite come to fruition because of how we decided to execute, or because of what happened in that execution space. And that's what we're talking about today.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Yeah, I mean, there's a reason why when people talk about strategy, execution is is usually in the same sentence, and there's usually some confusion around uh the coordination of those uh tasks activities to take you from actually trying to achieve your your strategy, right, in those execution activities. And I think beyond just projects, I think it's it's it's often uh difficult to get a large group of human beings to do things, right? Herding chickens, yes, yes, hurting chickens, herding cats, you know, whatever term people want to use. And there's you know, there's a lot of different layers of this. It's there's strategy uh plans, right? And then there's execution plans. And so uh depending on how you're coordinating, even developing the strategy, are you thinking about how this is actually going to get done? And then on the execution side, okay, we're gonna do this, but then nobody's questioning the strategy that's governing the execution plan. And then I think from a um coordination standpoint, the people or the the plan to to coordinate between these different parties, do you even have the right people in the room? Like have you actually done this sort of activity before? And it's it's uh it's difficult and it's it gets very complicated, especially when you have uh different groups that represent different disciplines and expertise. And so it really is a it's an art, I would say almost to be able to coordinate among the different uh parties to translate your strategy into what you want to execute.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

You know, I you know me from my history and and from the way I engage myself, but I'm such a huge proponent of you know what project managers do and program managers, and you know, when you find strong ones that can see what's happening and they take those extra steps, those extra measures. Because, like you mentioned, you know, we're we take that strategy and we say, it's clear the organization wants a drug discovered by the end of the year, or they want us to reach a development candidate by the end of the year. That's the strategy. No, that's a goal, that's the the end point. You know, your strategy is in, you know, the the how you're going to develop it, the people that you're developing it for, um, you know, that patient population, how this will eventually be commercialized. How early can you find out whether or not the product that you're building has the legs to be commercialized? Because as we know, you can discover things that are

Strategy Versus Goals And The How

SPEAKER_00 6:50

at such minute, such finite levels that scaling it is virtually impossible uh naturally. You have to create synthetics, which are you know rounds and rounds and rounds of design and development to try to find something that is, you know, essentially a carbon copy of something that occurs naturally, for example. And and you nailed it. That that coordinate, I mean, we we talk about what's happening here, and that coordination is such a challenging piece. Because as we talked about at the beginning and the opener, is that there are some cases where the dependencies become implicit. Everybody knows that. Oh, that yeah, they know that's that's theirs, but we don't write it anywhere. It's not in the timeline, it's not connected to any goals. And these are critical pieces to that larger program. You know, we're looking at the the accountability starts to sort of diffuse across the the teams. We have this project team that understands what role they need to take on to fulfill what they need to produce, you know, within a given amount of time. And then as they separate and they go on to their own separate ways, you have multiple functions that are now involved partially because they have a specific role that might not be now, it might be in around six months. But then there's a team change that happens, and now that person's not there. And now there's somebody else that's there, but there was no handoff or coordination of knowledge transfer of when these things are done, what your responsibility is going to be, what you are positioned to do and to accomplish in your function as a part of that program. So there's a lot here that I think are things that we've experienced time and time again. And it becomes this sort of, you know, you go back to present to leadership and it's not what they thought. It's not the direction, it's not, you know, and and in some cases you have enough parties that are involved where you can sort of pitch back and forth. And the strong ones are the ones that go back to the leaders and say, what do you want out of this strategy? What do you mean by this strategy? What are the things that you are looking for? Because let's be honest, when you have seasoned leaders that are not talking about the day-to-day how we're gonna bake the bread, they're just delivering the strategy of we're gonna be the best bakery in Massachusetts, in in the Boston area, in California, in the world. Okay, but what does that mean to get there? What does that mean to be the best? And how do you bridge that gap? There's another stuff, there was another research that was done that's uh showed the senior leaders who believed change was being managed well, about 45% of leaders, but the individual contributors who agreed with that was only 23%. So that's mirroring again this self-report of leaders of how well people are aligned. And alignment is not this sort of meeting outcome. It is how you are operationalizing this, that we are aligned. Why? Because we we have everything written down of who's responsible for what, the timeline that it needs to be done in, the budget constraints that we have, the hurdles that we need to go over, and gates in there between now and the end of the year for us to check and to reference. But that's not always the case, is it? That's not always the case that we have such a strong foundational understanding of what needs to happen, who needs to be involved, who was responsible, how much time and how much money.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Yeah, where do you I'm interested? So, where do you typically see this tension? So I I think for um, and I'm just gonna, you know, guess based on the types of functions that you typically work with. I would imagine that there's a lot of tension between both the the portfolio management group and the actual project managers that are actually doing the execution for the strategy. I think from a facilities and engineering perspective, we usually see this tension with the people designing buildings versus the ones that are building them. It's like, I want to build the most amazing building, but then the the or design the most amazing building, but the builders are like, that's impossible, like based on whatever this you know design that you have. I think on the, you know, once you get even get into the building itself, there's always a tension between the engineers who want to, you know, operate a system a certain way or maintain it a certain way, but then the actual technicians doing it are like, this is impossible to do. And there's always this like um back and

Where The Tension Shows Up

SPEAKER_01 11:39

forth of like your plans are unrealistic and you haven't considered the practical implications of whatever that strategy is. But then on the other side of it, I think for the the people that are doing the work, they look at it and go, Wow, why are we even doing this in the first place? You we should be questioning the strategy. You know, we don't need to replace you know this particular gasket every month or every six months. We can just measure the thickness of it and then replace it when we need to. Right? So there's I think there's there's uh there's always this tension between uh certain groups, and you know, narrowing it down to two is is very simplistic. So I I think from a, you know, um when you're working with some of these uh biotech companies that are at these other organizations, like where do you typically see this tension between the the strategy and execution and the coordination?

SPEAKER_00 12:29

I mean, honestly, I feel like the tension happens right after an executive level meeting. And what I mean by that, well, they're so what's actually breaking? You know, we talk about uh when we talk about our risk assessments that we have, all each of these risk assessments looks at specific risk factors that cover how fragile your work, your your workflow is, uh, is it visible the stakeholder load? Is there even load across the people that are involved? And how resilient is it to change? But change is usually what causes these things. Either leadership changes and they have a different strategic agenda. The organization itself might want to integrate more AI. That's a major change. And we don't pull the right people together, we don't really have the proper forums. You know, there's just in general a poor translation of the strategy that often lives inside of a slide deck,

Slide Decks Versus Monday Morning

SPEAKER_00 13:30

and no one is quite positioned to take this strategy and run it through their tactics. Because since it's drug development, it should just be like a straight, a straight shot, right? But there are so many ways to develop a drug, a therapeutic, a medical device, so many different ways and and sort of angles to take, right? You can, you know, and and an example is just the number of drugs that perhaps are supporting, you know, diabetes or pancreatic cancer or what have you. They don't all approach the same mechanism of action. They have different ones. So the strategy is sort of aligned with that. Well, there's nobody in this space, so we're going to develop something in this space because we know that this linker can help produce X in the body and alleviate symptoms, whatever the case is. But we have this sort of issue that happens right in the beginning where you know middle management is sort of left guessing, right? Like, what like what was what was that that they were saying? I've been in meetings. We walk out of the meeting, and what what happens is you have 55 minutes of dialogue, of background, and scientific, you know, research and what it means and what it could mean, and what other experiments you could do, and and then you have five minutes to make a decision, and then you walk out of the meeting, and all of a sudden you got people on the team that are looking at me as the project manager and going, so what's the next thing that we're doing? Because we didn't stop and align everything. We talked too much about other stuff without coming to a decision. You know, in those cases, like you could call that poor meeting management. But there's this sort of it and it can be very challenging in RD because what you'll hear most from the research side of things, whether it's for a biologic or whether it's for a medical device or anything else that you have a research team is when are you gonna have that done? How many times are we gonna do? How many times, how many rounds of testing are we gonna do? How many rounds of development are we gonna do? Try to get a straight answer from that. Especially when there's a strategy that is broad. We want to develop a peptide that does X, Y, and Z, but only in patients that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's no platform set up, the essays are not there, developed yet. And so now you have a lot of time to say, okay, we want to develop a product, but we also need to be able to test it on, you know, five or ten different metrics and values respective to this therapeutic. Okay. And what's happening is getting alignment from the tactical pieces when those are not always clear, especially nowadays where you're anybody that's doing anything organic, you're trying to do something that doesn't exist. Right? You're trying to do something, you're trying to you don't want to develop a Me Too where yes, we're recreating that drug, but our patients have a 10% higher survival. Okay, is that going to get approved? I don't know. The side effects are pretty bad. So we look at these and there's this sort of conflict between leadership and that middle management group who is in charge of running the experimentation or running the projects and the folks on the team and creating that translation so that everyone on the team is on board and understands the path that has to move forward. Another thing that you find is these sort of unmanaged cross-functional dependencies. Have you been in a situation where you know what other folks are responsible for, but it's not quite written anywhere? There's no start time, there's no end time. We just know that a giant document with all of our all of our information, our entire research plan, the data to support it, what's needed, the budget, et cetera, lives on a function. But maybe you don't have somebody representing that function. Maybe they're shorthanded. It's not in the timeline, it's not anywhere on the slide deck. And then you get ready to do that presentation. It's two months away, and you go, we don't have that research plan. This person was supposed to design it, but we don't have somebody in that group. Now there's a two-month scramble to write

Hidden Dependencies And Late Scrambles

SPEAKER_00 18:07

something, put something together that's requesting more money from the leadership to say, hey, here's where we're going.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

Yeah, I think there's uh there's a lot of good examples of this. Um, and I'll I'll give two. I think one would be something that happens on like almost every single capital project is when equipment gets installed and it's it's ready for uh testing, we typically have to do calibrations on the equipment to make sure that the measurements are within a certain accuracy and and um precision. And so usually you usually have like pressure, you have weight, um, temperature. So those are all standard. But every now and then you'll get some specialized piece of instrumentation that the the folks in the lab want to use for the manufacturing environment. And that it might be something like a UV meter that's that's measuring something for chromatography. And that requires a special reference or standard to be able to test it. And so uh you'll see calibration techs or teams say, oh yes, you know, we'll be able to do you know the calibrations in you know this amount of

Real Examples From Ops And IT

SPEAKER_01 19:17

time. And then they walk up to the instrument and go, I've never seen this in my life. And and that's where the the the strategy is very clear, right? You have we have to complete all these calibrations within a certain amount of time because production is going to be ramping up. But then when you look at the execution, because they were, I don't know if it was overlooked or maybe some overconfidence about the actual scope of what they were supposed to do, they hit a roadblock and they say, Oh, we've never actually encountered this before. And it's this thing where, okay, well, we should have asked these questions as they were developing the strategy. You know, we want all these things calibrated, but okay, are we actually familiar with the things in here? Like you said, um, it's the same thing that happens with these RD teams is okay, for different modalities, there's a different strategy that you or execution plan that you go about researching some of these different types of drugs, right? So that's one example when when these calibration teams encounter these unique set of new technologies that come into the production floor. I think the other part of it is you know, the the project that I'm helping out now, you know, we're we're moving engineering drawings from one system to the other. And so the business owners are responsible for the SOP and the work instructions around how you manage the drawings. But there's the other piece of it, which is actually the data, right? Like, okay, how are we actually moving the data from here to here? And that is is within the the the IT realm. And so they have their own tools and uh, I guess, methods for how you would would migrate the or transition the data over to the new system. And so, you know, one of the roadblocks that we're encountering now with the particular project is that certain tools have to be tested so that the the files themselves are they're able to fit in the new environment and all the data going there is actually what you want it to look like once it's in the new home. And so because the team that's on the the business process side isn't familiar with those IT activities, it's you know, from from that perspective, I think we're assuming that, you know, oh, this is something that happens all the time, and it's like they'll be fine, we're just loading in drawings. But I think that assumption that this other team knows what they're doing, it it hides some of the the maybe um issues that come with developing a project timeline. Because now you have delays in that, and what we had thought would take three days is now going to take a month. That's a problem. Like we didn't we didn't encounter you know that uh ahead of time. And so that skews not only the uh the timeline because it's extending it. But also, okay, the uh the goal at the beginning of the project was to get this done within a certain amount of time, and now we're having to explain why this is not feasible anymore because we didn't understand the execution of it at that level.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

And that's right. And I think that as you know, these strategic discussions happen, there should be, you know, so so how do we get in front of this? I think that a part that's missing in in certain instances is that there isn't this sort of tactical discussion of like, we have a great strategy, but can we actually do that operationally? Do you have the resources to support that strategy? There's this assumption of just like, okay, we'll do that, and then you can hire the right people, but it's not always hiring the right people. Do you know a contract organization that can perform some of these things that you're trying to do? Do they have a lead time? Do they have to do any sort of new configuration to their system to take in your product and test it? Right? Oh, because it's slightly different, but we can do, oh, we didn't know that there was going to be a four-week lead time to design it in their system. But that's the only group that we know that can do what

Can We Execute This Operationally

SPEAKER_00 23:16

we're asking it to do. You know, and and those are some of the challenges that we can see that that will just slip right by. And especially if the roles and responsibilities are not clear with who needs to be making those dis who needs to be pulling up those discussions with uh the right experts at the right time, early enough. Because the reality of it is matrix organizations, you're not working on one project. You're working on four, you're working on five. So where this might be priority, the incentives aren't really aligned for you to make that your priority. Right. And, you know, I started looking into sort of the incentive structure. You know, is this communication? Is this that incentives are in the wrong place? And what do I mean by that? Well, typically you go to an organization and you have goals, right? I have goals, I have professional development that I'm going to do. Um, we're going to improve some of our process. There's also a few goals in there related to the project. But how are we setting up these goals, these structures, these incentives? If your function achieves X, if you personally achieve X, Y, Z, supporting this, supporting that. Of course, you want to try to get goals that are measurable, not just, oh, I'm going to work on that. I'm going to support that. So what does that mean? It's a very blanketed statement. But what's happening is that we are sort of battling with what leadership is asking for, what is in that strategic

Incentives That Undercut The Program

SPEAKER_00 24:56

slide deck and how that affects our incentives, our bonuses, our it is rare to find incentives in 2026, even in all these organizations to be mapped back to a program. Typically, it is to the function or to the individual person. So all of these efforts to improve, go faster, et cetera, only really provide incentive to that person, to that employee personally, or via their function. Now I'll give you an example. Because we knew if we could execute with this program and achieve trial enrollment by X date, which you know, enrollment is very difficult. But what does that mean? You need the startup to be quick and thorough so that they can start taking in patients and start screening patients, and you could continue to make progress towards that goal, making sure there's diversity in who's enrolling all the patients. So that was an example of having an incentive that was not based on my function, was not based on me individually, it was based on the program, the success of the program. So that created that, that filled a little bit of that gap behind the strategy, what needed to be executed, and our role in pushing that out.

unknown 26:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:37

Do you think uh for I I know well, I I think it when we talk about this, it may seem very uh linear, right? Like you establish a strategy, and then there's some planning, and then there's an execution, but I think the reality is it's messy, and the strategy for the most part, I would say stays intact, but it's not it's not a hundred percent certain that the strategy stays the same throughout the lifecycle of a project or or even a company, right? Like things are always changing, you have different business needs, and so if there's any adjustments that you need to make, that usually shifts uh on the execution side as well. And and you you mentioned about the prioritization, right? So this is where it comes in is not everything that is uh let's say an issue in the strategy or the execution plan needs to get addressed because we we do not have the time, money, or resources to address every single thing. And the plan is not supposed to be perfect, right? You you want it to be fluid enough where you can have some sort

Feedback Loops And Risk Assessments

SPEAKER_01 27:37

of like feedback loop and to be able to prioritize, okay, these are the things that are actually going to make the biggest difference in us achieving the goal, which is what these the strategy and the execution is based, what which is what we're doing in the first place, right? The whole point of this is to get us to the goal. And if not, we're not willing to budge on the strategy or the execution plan, then we're never going to reach the goal. And so, but even that, you know, we're not supposed to be fixing every single thing that comes up. And so I think this kind of leads into you know what you mentioned about the assessments. It's it's uh it's not only a way for teams to communicate those concerns or or feedback around some of the adjustments that they feel need to be made on a on a project, but there's some scoring in there as well, right? I I think this is something that we haven't talked about in the previous episodes, is it's it's both a qualitative and quantitative look at okay, these risk factors, and then you score them, right? And so there's certain areas that are more important to a project depending on the nuances of your project or your organization that point you in the right direction. It's not to say that every single thing that you point out is going to be solved, but these things seem to be making the biggest impact based on the collective response of the people taking the assessment. And I think that's a really key aspect of the assessments itself, right? It's not just this, okay, here are all the problems and we're just gonna solve them all because that's not realistic and nobody does this in real life.

SPEAKER_00 29:14

We have to look for the things that will you know create the biggest impact, and that is different from an organization that is filled with early development programs and an organization that has you know two or three programs that are getting into the IMD space, you know, getting into the NDA space after clinical trials, you know, trying to get an approved drug, for example, those risks are going to be different. The problems can be very much the same, you know. But as we're talking about this and and you know, you bringing up the assessment again, we also introduce sort of an organizational factor because it also depends on the size of your team. It depends on where you are in your your program cycle. Are you towards the end? Are you in the very beginning where things are very fluid, things are not well known or really put down on paper where you get towards the end, and things have to be pretty concrete. You know, there is some fluidity here and there, but they require, you know, messaging to regulatory and you know, regulatory spaces in order to make any kind of change to the data you're collecting, to the population that you're serving, to the the you know, design of the trial, for example. So there's, you know, I think what we want to make sure that the listeners understand is that, you know, if these issues, if these challenges are things that sound or feel familiar, where you are walking out of a meeting, even a meeting with leaders, and you go, I don't know what I'm supposed to do differently. But it was clear from the meeting I was just in, they're not happy. What am I supposed to do? So this assessment, the the the assessment that we have to look and diagnose this information is not just necessarily a diagnostic tool, because oftentimes we feel that there's something wrong. We feel that, you know, we're not there to tell you again, yes, this is actually what's happening. We're there to give you the language for it, the structure behind it, and where the most important changes can be made to avoid these things in the future. You know, if most leaders believe that they're aligned, we also have to look at this from another way. If most leaders believe they are aligned and the data shows that there's this sort of 3x gap between what leaders believe and what individual contributors are also feeling from their end in terms of the clarity of the strategy and how they're executing, you know, why is that gap happening? What does it feel like from inside the organization? And I think this is something where I really want to empower folks to speak up more. And in some cases, that's difficult because you may have more than one project leader where you're looking at something and you want to raise a flag and you want to bring something up. But then others within that team dynamic went, no, no, no, that's we don't need to bring this up. We don't need to, you have to talk to somebody. You have to talk to somebody and not just stay in the circle that is your team. Have that communication back with leadership. Don't necessarily make a slide deck for it, but have the conversation to say, hey, I see where we're going with this, but this was unclear. We're not sure how to tactfully deliver what you're doing. You know, the whole goal here is that it's a conversation between leaders and the teams. And remember, these are matrix teams. They're not just research and project teams. There's also HR that helps you onboard new people. There's IT that helps give you access to all the systems that you need to perform your duties. There's finance to make sure that budgeted items are actually being paid out so that you don't have lags in your external spend that is causing timeline delays in your program because you haven't paid people or what have you. You know? But the reality of it is none of these groups have their own goals or their program goals that look back, or sorry, their functional goals that look back at the program or even the strategy. Because finance is going to have different measures of success for the finance group, which are will have different goals for their, and I will I would be shocked if I saw any supporting function goal that is working on a program to have goals that match that map to the program and map to the strategy. That has to be done. There is this sort of compulsory need to give, you know, to make your bonus part of your personal goal and your and your functional goal. But you're not doing things in a bubble. Most of your projects, which are designed to generate products or therapeutics or medical devices that eventually go on to support patients and provide revenue for the organization to continue to grow and to build, right? And so, how are we linking those things into the incentive structure at the organization? That's I think that's a huge miss. I don't see it often at all. It is based on your performance as an individual or the performance of your group, never looking back at how a program performs. If it fails, well, it just, you know, it failed. So we get an X for that one on the executive level goals. But I nailed 100% of my personal goals and my function nailed, you know, 95%. We get all of our bonus money. But you never provided any incentive to actually crush that program, to actually really bring that program on the strategy that was developed. And those strategies can change, right? You know, we're gonna have a lot of times these things are driven by the scientific data that we get. You know, we have an idea, a plan, we test it all. Some things may not be as good as what's on the market. So you have to readjust, change strategy. Totally understand that. So we have to understand that as you know, being part of a team, especially a cross-functional team, it's partially our responsibility to seek clarity, have those discussions before everyone scatters and starts to work on their own, and then memorialize them, put them into your timeline. Why can't your timeline be more bigger, be bigger and more hairy than it is now? You need to have a plan of attack because six months is not is going to come and go very quickly. So you need to be able to have as much foresight as you can to understand what are the challenges and then measure that going back to the strategy. I would it's rare to find a team that says, okay, let's look back at our goals and then say, Do our goals match back up to the strategy slides? You know, the good ones get those strategic initiatives, those goals from the leadership stakeholders, and they can map their project and their personal and the functional goals back to that strategy. This is for 1.2, this one is for 3.2, this one is for 4.7, whatever list of bullet strategic initiatives that appear on a slide deck, right? But it's important for us to continue to bring those back into conversations, to point back. Is that our goal? You know, in anything, in anything, not just working in a program, but consistently reiterating it, having the conversation, and also having the conversation of does this strategy still make sense? Based on what we have, is there anything else that we have planned in the next six months that would change our mind about what's happening here? No, then we need to have another conversation about the strategy where this is going, or seek an additional perspective because right now this is a bad idea, this is a roadblock, this is a stoppage in the work that we're doing. It's rare for people to do that, to feel that ability to have that conversation, to feel to feel enabled to have that conversation.

SPEAKER_01 37:57

Yeah, and and that, you know, you mentioned the the scenario where somebody comes out of a you know high-level planning meeting and and feeling that doubt, you know, that the the clarity and the the confidence that usually happens after you have a number of very hard conversations about this is what's happening. And I I think the reason why a lot of teams or organizations like don't even get to that point is because there isn't a maybe there's not a safe space to do that. You know, you don't want to come off as like, I'm complaining about something, or this is about my team not being able to deliver something. And I think that's where having a a facilitator, whether it's internal or external, right? Like you can have a a different uh maybe the middle manager coordinating or facilitating that conversation, but you know, how you're actually doing that, I think is important. And I think the assessment is one option of doing that, where you can have this safe space where people can communicate

Creating Safe Space For Hard Truths

SPEAKER_01 38:58

those issues and lead to those hard conversations that need to be had so that everybody can feel clear and confident in what they're going to do when they come into work. Otherwise, you you have situations where people are they have these uh feelings and thoughts about how things are going, and then that never gets communicated, and then six months down the road, we never achieved our goals, and then they you know, management it everybody gets surprised by how couldn't we execute this? And I I I think it's uh that's that doesn't happen very often because these are very difficult conversations to have. And I think the assessments are an easier way to or a simpler way to have these, right? I I don't necessarily think that these just because something is simple doesn't mean that it's not hard. These are it's still going to be very difficult for people to communicate these things, but at least it's a simpler method than you know having a bunch of people email and having a bunch of meetings about things. It's it's just a it's a more streamlined way to actually collect that uh feedback.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

That's right. I mean, I think when you just now when you said it's streamlined, I mean, why does any of this matter? Why does any of this matter? Because when you are aligned at the beginning, when you're aligned at the top of the organization, that in no way guarantees that the execution or the coordination of that execution is going to go well. You can have the best people with the best intentions, but unless you have this sort of unified understanding of what tact tactfully you are going to do, what are the physical things you're going to do? Who needs to get brought in early enough to have these conversations, to make sure that those things that we are planning to do are sound and measure that back up to that, to that strategy. And they're hard decisions, and they're they're also very hard to sort of pinpoint what those problems are. So, you know, the assessment gives that opportunity to, you know, answer a set of questions that starts to look at different areas that are not just, you know, again, we talked about the visibility, the resilience, you know, what, you know, how fragile is that workflow? If somebody leaves, people leave mid-project all the time. How long does it take to fill that gap? When that gap is filled and the person comes in, do they know where they are starting out? Do they know when they have something that's due? Do they know how to do it? Right. You know, in some cases, we put a body into that position because we need somebody to go to that meeting and then come back and talk to their manager about what to do. That's a different, that's a different person than someone that is a fully, you know, autonomous individual contributor. They have the expertise, they have, you know, the knowledge, they understand the goal, and they're just providing updates to their manager while they're working on a project. Two different scenarios, very much both possible. So, you know, when we're this episode comes to really point out a few things that we see in cross-functional projects and other initiatives that involve people from varying backgrounds, from varying technical capabilities and capacities. The problem is typically not that people disagree, it's that agreement at the top that doesn't cascade into the tasks that are needed to execute it. The we had come into an issue where tactical priorities are not translated. The they're assumed in many cases to be obvious. Oh, well, everybody knows that. Well, this is drug development. Oh, well, this is a biologic. Oh, this is a peptide. Oh, well, this is, you know, whatever, this is diabetes, or this is cancer research. That doesn't mean anything to a lot of people. These things need to be explicit, they need to be written, they need to be cataloged, they need to enter a timeline so that we have something to measure up against and to keep everybody aligned. These are tools that we have that when we underutilize them, these gaps start to show up. You know just enough, but then you have holes that just slowly start to seep in. They become even more grossly fragmented when you talk about uh projects now that are utilizing

Making Work Explicit And Trackable

SPEAKER_00 43:14

a newly merged organization. You guys talk different, you guys work differently, you guys have different risk tolerances, you don't even have an alignment on when something is going to go off to the next group. Because typically you're not buying a company that's more of your same people, right? You're buying a new arm of that company. So they have a way of doing things, they have a way of managing their own spaces that is more than likely different than what you're doing. And those things are really important for us to understand and to and to be true to. These, you know, the dependencies that we have, well, this and then here, and then here, and then here, these dependencies, these predecessor relationships, sometimes are not clear until they create an issue. They create some crisis. Well, we didn't know. Well, that information wasn't. Given to us. We have to have, we have to feel empowered to ask questions, even when they are difficult, even when they are uncomfortable. To have these conversations, to make sure I I love having a good knowledge share. I call them knowledge share meetings. We're going to talk. I need to hear what's going on in your space. I'm going to let you in on some of the things that are happening in my space and my conversations so that you can adjust your approach based on the new information that I'm that I'm granting you. You know, and that is part of the work that I take on as a project manager or managing whatever projects, either with a client or otherwise. It's to make sure that you're constantly having that over-communication because there are factors beyond your knowledge that affect various people on your team. So you need to make sure that these communications are, you know, available, right? We need to make sure we have really close communications with leadership, not just quarterly when that update needs to happen. But be really crystal clear. Hey, it's okay to say, all right, we got two months until we're due to deliver X. Here's where we are. I want to talk about the things that we're doing, and I want to see if there's any concerns. Now we have two months. They're going to say, oh, have you considered this? Have you considered that? That doesn't mean drop everything you're doing and go find a vendor and go do all those things. They're asking if you've considered it. They're asking if there's pros and cons to it, you know, whatever the situation might be, because they're not doing the research you're doing. So having that relationship as well, where you can have conversations with leadership and not take everything they say as a direct assignment. Well, they said to do this. No, they said to check into it. You only had two months. There was no way you were going to get that done. Right? Have that understanding. And if it's not clear, ask. You need to ask. Is that a directive? Or is that something? No, no, no, no, no. I want you to look into it. If it makes sense and you can do it in the timeline, then let's let's consider doing that. If it's just out of the out of the realm of possibility to finish in two months, don't do it. That might be something we'll wait for the next for the next phase of development. Okay, clear. Right? So let's do that. Let's have those conversations. And just want to go one more thing into what we said before. Uh, that alignment should not feel like a meeting outcome. It should be how we aim to operate with alignment. I think this was a conversation that uh many of us have felt in the past. So if you go into a meeting and you come out and it doesn't make sense, and you don't understand why you're doing one thing or why leadership is asking for another, find out. Don't live with the ambiguity of not understanding where things are going because there may also be some assumptions that are made. Oftentimes there are assumptions that are made that are so implicit, they've they're never written down. And then you find out that there is an organizational change. Well, now they change and that department doesn't exist. So that person is not going to be doing this work anymore. So, what's the change in that? Folks at the top are thinking about that. They're thinking about other things. They're gonna make the change, you need to make sure it still works.

SPEAKER_01 47:24

So it's important for us to have these questions. Probably not the only one that feels that way.

SPEAKER_00 47:29

So thank you all so much for spending time with us today, and we truly appreciate you being part of the Lean by Design podcast community. Um, if this conversation resonated with you, I invite you to check out my new book, Predictably Broken. It's out on shelves, uh, virtual, digital, and part and uh paperback copy, where I look and I take a candid perspective on these patterns of operational friction that quietly slow your team down and what to do about them. And if you are ready to take the next step, please go onto our website, Sigma Lab Consulting.com, and check out our operational risk assessments. They are uh it's essentially a hybrid engagement where you get to work with us to identify, prioritize, and clearly communicate the friction points in your organization so that you can move forward with confidence and alignment. And at the end of that, you receive a 30, 60, 90 day sponsor kit that you can take to your leaders at your organization to have the right conversation on things that need to change

Next Steps And Resources

SPEAKER_00 48:30

or things that need to be transformed with your organization. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram at psyguy underscore insights. And you can now watch the podcast on YouTube on our podcast channel, which is at Leanby Design Podcast. All the links are in the show notes. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.