Business Alignment is Killing You

I made this remark a while back in conversation with Martin Couzins, and since he thought it memorable enough to cite in this PersonnelToday article, I thought it worthy of further explanation.

For twenty years or so I've been attending learning conferences where someone will carp on about how important business alignment is. It's the 101 of conference speeches. It's the sound of training pleading to be taken seriously.

Well, business alignment is killing you, and I'd like to explain why.

Imagine for a second that you said 'to hell with business alignment - we're actually going to go out there and help people. Fix stuff!'. Imagine that you interviewed leaders and salespeople in your business and discovered that they wanted their teams to be more engaged and their sales figures to be higher, respectively.

Imagine - for the sake of argument - that you built a system that catalogues the things that motivate people in teams and systematically reminds leaders to address them. Imagine you built a gamified product knowledge system. What if engagement and productivity increased as a result? What if sales figures improved? Do you really think the business would complain?

Now imagine a team of corporate Morris-dancers, practised in the art of jumping about and waving sticks. This year the business priority is innovation. So they come up with a special 'innovation' dance and go on tour.

I think that businesses are more likely to be sceptical about training's ability to deliver results, than whether it is aligned.

Obsessing over alignment is a distraction that prevents people from obsessing instead over what they can do to really improve individual performance. A fixation that prevents people aligning with the learner. Of course we should work on things that matter to the business - but you won't achieve business alignment unless you start with employee alignment.

The distinction boils down to process: if your process is identifying business priorities and then pushing related content and courses at people, then almost certainly you are Morris-dancing. If your process starts with understanding people working in your business, then figuring out what you can do to help them perform - then you have a shot at business alignment.

In other areas this 'design thinking' approach is better understood: your products won't sell if they're not easy to use. You won't create great products and services unless you work with the customer.

We just need to make it happen in learning.