aligning strategy, processes, and people in organizations

7/14/2014 Aligning Strategy, Processes, and People in Organizations

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Application of Pyramid Building in Organizations:

Aligning Strategy, Processes, and People in Organizations

by Prasad Kaipa, Chris Newham and Russ Volckmann

Thanks for all our friends who have given us suggestions on improving thisarticle. A modified and some what brief version of this article with exclusivefocus on alignment appears in the April Issue of the Systems Thinker.

Table of Contents

What Is It All About?

Introduction

Achieving Alignment

The Pyramid Building Approach

What is Pyramid Building?

Building the Enterprise Pyramid

The Other Perspective

Why Examine the 'Other' Side?

Emergent and Foundation Perspectives

How Has the Pyramid Building Approach Influenced Our Own Work?

Application of This Approach in Other Organizations

Conclusions

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What is It All About?

We have developed a powerful multi-dimensional learning approach thatworks directly with client issues while allowing reflection, dialogue andagreement on three levels: Clarifying intentions, agreeing on desiredoutcomes and identifying actions that allow us to get to those outcomes.Thirty organizations including five Fortune 100 companies have used thismethodology successfully in designing strategy, clarify their mission, design



executive development programs in addition to designing books,management CD-ROMs and five year strategic plans with built-inassessment tools. It has four qualities that no other tool we have seen has:

1. It results in creating a 3-D model that fits in your hand and allows youto examine the model from different perspectives and to understand itas a system.

2. The process of creating the model is interactive, inclusive and allowsfor both head and heart to be deeply involved (the concepts as well asthe energy with which those concepts are presented are important).

3. Reflection and action orientation are both included during the creationas well as the implementation stages. It is possible to look at thesystem, its parts and their interdependencies and relationshipsseparately and together.

4. The process of creating the model is generative and innovative. Themodel, when properly developed, is simple and complex at the sametime. Its simplicity is expressed through its focus on three levels. Itscomplexity can be discovered in the generation of individual andshared meaning from those three levels.

5. The pyramid as a product represents explicit, tacit and unmanifested(generative) dimensions. Explicit are our intentions, tacit are ouractions and unmanifested are outcomes that we hope to achieve.

In this article, we apply our approach to a specific issue: Bringingalignment between strategy, processes and people in anorganization. While giving an example of our own, we help you tounderstand what our approach is, how you design pyramid tool andapply it in your situation, and what its potential is.

As with presentation of any new approach, it has applications beyondwhat we have envisioned. The purpose of this article is to generateinterest in it and develop further applications in organizations. Wewelcome your feedback!

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Introduction

Most organizational change efforts have produced, mixed results.Models, approaches, and concepts that make sense in the beginninghave often not produced desired outcomes. Somehow, the structuresput in place, the strategy that drives the change effort, and theprocesses that bring about change leave people drained of energy.We would like to re-energize this process in a way that will engagepeople's vision and passion, and align change strategies with theprocesses that fulfill them.



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Achieving Alignment

Aligning an organization's strategy, processes, and people is achallenge and almost unachievable in most circumstances. Whenachieved, alignment greatly improves opportunities for reachingdesired outcomes. This challenge can be met where there is integrityand a willingness to collectively face such questions as:

Can the individuals in our group agree on what we want to do?Can we devise a strategy to do it?What actions must we take to do it?When we're done, have we achieved the outcomes weexpected?

Alignment includes learning about self and others through comparingour perspectives with those of others. It requires unlearning, as well aslearning. And it is a nonstop, dynamic process within organizationallife that must coordinate individual intentions, collective means, anddesired results.

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The Pyramid Building Approach

Our approach for aligning strategies, processes and people explicitlyallows organizations to clarify intentions, take actions, and producedesirable outcomes. It is particularly useful for revealing therelationships among critical variables and for uncovering theimplications for organizational action and change. It provides a socialcontext to discover values, assumptions, and beliefs. Groups in thirtyorganizations in five countries have used this approach to developalignment for a wide variety of purposes. Read an Interview with TomGrant about Pyramid Building in the Ford Motor Company.

These have ranged from an executive group of an internationalcompany developing their shared vision, to a start-up group in aFortune 100 company creating business strategies to a professionalorganization building a framework for exploring their future. In thisarticle, we describe the Pyramid Building Approach and use apyramid we built for our own work as an example.

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What is Pyramid Building?

Pyramid Building is a method for identifying critical variables in acomplex system and mapping their relationships and resulting



interactions. The process relies on brainstorming, dialogue, anddecision-making to build alignment among participants. The productof this process is a 3-D pyramid with identified intentions, actions, andoutcomes mapped onto the corners, edges, and faces. The pyramidrepresents the clarity that has been achieved about the system'svariables and their relationships. The meaning associated with eachof these terms evolves and changes as we experience, learn, anddialogue. Nevertheless, at any given moment we are prepared to takeaction based on our understanding of these terms at that time.

To be precise, we are creating objects geometrically known astetrahedrons, a pyramid with a triangular base (see FIGURE 1 below).

Figure 1: A Tetrahedron

A tetrahedral pyramid has four identical triangular faces, unlike anEgyptian pyramid which has four triangular faces and a rectangularbase. The Egyptian pyramid is symmetrical only when rotated arounda vertical axis. The tetrahedron, by contrast, can be rotated aroundany axis and retain its shape. Therefore, any corner can become theapex. Thus, there is no structural hierarchy in the tetrahedron.

There are key advantages in choosing a tetrahedron over an Egyptianpyramid as the 3-D object to map our model. Each face of atetrahedron connects with the other three faces and each cornersimilarly connects with the other three corners. These inclusiveconnections are important because they support the notion ofconnectedness between all elements of a system. The tetrahedronpermits us to see the interconnection between various systemelements and allows us to model and 'play' with the whole system in atangible form. In the following paragraphs, we describe the process ofbuilding a tetrahedral pyramid through an example.

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Building the Enterprise Pyramid

The CPR Group comprises three partners. When we explored thepotential of partnership, we knew that we have complimentary skillsand shared interests that would support our working together



synergisticly, but we needed to clarify how we could align our these ina way that would include and transcend our individual work andorientations. Our major professional efforts had been organizationdevelopment, researching the nature of learning, and managementconsulting, each augmented by a shared interest in self development.At the core of these disciplines, we identified four importanceprocesses:

relationship building,

the learning process,

organizing for outcomes,

and changing our perspectives (world-view).

As our conversations progressed, we saw that we have beenexploring different dimensions of development and that we couldidentify our intentions as Organization Development, KnowledgeDevelopment, Business Development, and Self Development. Thesefour intentions represent our individual strengths and commitments,and together, they represent key aspects of our organization. Wechose those four intentions as "cornerstones" and mapped them ontoa pyramid, which we now designated as our Enterprise Pyramid (seeFigure 2).

Fig. 2: Our intentions formed the cornerstones of our Enterprise

Pyramid

This simple representation suggested some lines of inquiry. Eachcornerstone is connected to the other three, so that each intention isforced into relation with the others. For example, we began to askourselves:

What is the relationship between business development andorganization development?

How does the combination of business, organization, andknowledge development best contribute to a change process?



What are the implications of excluding self-development?

6. What are the likely outcomes of emphasizing only two or three of the

intentions to the exclusion of others?

Our reflection and dialogue about the connections between pairs ofintentions led to concepts that 'bridge' the two cornerstones. While thecornerstones represent our individual intentions, the edges representthe actions necessary to arrive at collective, shared outcomes. Ouractions not only connect and balance our individual intentions but also'include and transcend' the polarity between them.

For example, we saw that strategizing is where business developmentand knowledge development come together. Knowledge is requiredto formulate a strategy for the business development. The process ofidentifying strategies, in turn, focuses our efforts in knowledgedevelopment. Strategizing does not have to include organization orself-development directly and in many organizations it doesn't!

Since edges represent actions, they are often most usefullyrepresented by action words; gerunds, which form the basis forassessment or measurement of the strength of the connection (seeFigure 3). Each cornerstone or intention gets defined by three edgesor actions, through which it connects to the other three cornerstones.We found (with some trial and error) that the actions we identifiedfulfilled our intentions very well:

Self Development: visioning, creating, realizing

Organization Development: visioning, valuing, learning

Business Development: valuing, strategizing, realizing

Knowledge Development: strategizing, learning, creating

In this process of validating intentions and actions, we reaffirmed ourcommitment to find outcomes that supported our intentions.



Fig. 3. Actions that include and transcend our intentions

(portrayed on a pyramid opened at the Business Development apex

and laid flat)

We next examined the four faces of the pyramid. They took on themeaning of the outcomes produced by the actions of the adjacentedges and the intentions of the cornerstones. Each pyramid facerepresents an outcome 'field' produced by the interaction of threeintentions and three actions. For example, 'Exploration' is the field

that results from the actions of visioning, learning and creating; andthe intentions of Organization Development, KnowledgeDevelopment, and Self Development (see Figure 4). Intention,Transformation, and Diffusion are the names of the other three

fields. Each represents an outcome that is born out of a set ofintentions and actions.

Fig. 4. The Enterprise Pyramid: intentions, actions and outcomes

This tetrahedron represents the holistic development perspective thatwe share. Cornerstones represent our intentions, edges the actionsthat we could take, and the faces outcomes resulting from ourinteractions. Thus, using the pyramid as a model of our collectiveinterests, we developed a shared view of the system that wecomprise. We found ourselves aligned, not just around components ofthe system, but around a growing understanding of the dynamicrelationships among them.

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The 'Other' Perspective

Figure 4 nicely represented our intentions and the actions that canfacilitate specific outcomes. This tetrahedron conveys a positive tone,because it represents our aspirations; it has an emergent quality to it.Why? Because we cannot predict what the result of transformation is



going to be before it takes place. Thus, we called this 'The EmergentPerspective' But what was on the "other" side? We wanted to seehow this perspective relates to our experience with the current realityof our clients' systems. We called this flip side 'The FoundationPerspective.'

Let us examine what happens in a business enterprise going througha change process. When people are not in touch with their dreamsand visions (shared or individual), the context of change can feedresistance, anxiety and survival behaviors. The organization becomesuninspiring and people lose their energy and creative capabilities. Butwhile people take change efforts seriously and try to make them work,some also find ways to avoid or even sabotage such efforts. While itis easy to let go of such saboteurs, from their perspective, they mayhave a valid reason to do what they do. Assuming that there isintegrity in people's resistance to change, we wanted to learn moreabout it. May be the proposed change is too much a break from thepast and may be the organization is better served by focusing oncontinuous improvement instead of transformational approach. Thus,our understanding of the Enterprise would not be complete withoutexamining 'The Foundation Perspective' as well, and our ability toproduce short-term results. So we set about designing acomplementary 'Foundation Perspective' (see Figure 5).

Fig. 5. The Foundation Perspective of Enterprises

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Why Examine the 'Other' Side?

When an organization is running smoothly and not undergoing rapidchange, leaders focus on: Results, Programs, Information, andTraining. They reflect a pragmatic attitude that is intended to sustainand grow the current organization. This approach focuses on whatworks and avoids looking at why it does.



These four intentions are directly related to those on the EmergentPerspective: Business Development is about producing sustainableresults. Organization Development has programs but also has anoverall design to it. Knowledge Development is more than justinformation acquisition and brings an integrative and interpretivedimension. Self Development, while providing training, supportspeople to take responsibility for themselves and their work!

Results at the Foundation level are pragmatic, e.g., continuousimprovement is intended to solve a problem or meet an immediateneed, and is not involved in a revisioning of the organization. Thus, away of thinking about the difference between results in the Emergentand Foundation Perspectives would be to think of an athlete'sperformance. When an athlete conditions and practices, her focus ison long term gains, developing her skills and stamina over time. Whilethere may be one major goal, an Olympic Medal or a championship,there are many challenges along the way. The conditioning andpractice program is geared to meeting each of these challenges withincreasingly effective performance.

During the competition, however, the time for exploration is over. Sheneeds to respond to whatever comes up during her performance. Shemust consider and react to differences in weather, 'field' conditions,and must challenge her skills and talent. The focus is on immediateresults. This is what the Foundation Perspective offers inorganizations. The pragmatic attitude is vital, for example, if productsare not selling, someone needs to take the risks of making practical,hard decisions to get the organization back on track.

We could also see the actions that routinely take place in the

organization: planning, controlling, improving, analyzing, presenting,

and imitating (we generously call it benchmarking). These are allactions that support smooth functioning of an organization and supportthe pragmatic approach.

The outcomes on the Foundation side of the pyramid are built on itscornerstones and actions. Negotiation is the process by which wepresent information, control the programs and plan for the results.Intervention takes place when we find a reason to control theprograms we offer and analyze the training so that we can improve theresults. Modification and Solution support imitating, planning, andpresenting to get the desired results.

This Foundation Perspective helped us to see what creates stableorganizations that focus on continuous improvement. They have clearground rules and a nurturing (albeit somewhat controlling and moremechanical) culture. Expectations and/or performance criteria areknown. There is consistency for routine activities. This is the



Foundation on which emergent perspectives can develop!

Building the Foundation Perspective exposed another criterion forpyramid development. Not only must cornerstones, edges, and facesbe consistent amongst themselves on one Perspective, but each mustcorrespond with its counterpart on the opposing Perspective. In thisway two processes are described, the Emergent Perspective'sforward-looking Intention --> Exploration --> Transformation -->

Diffusion cycle, and in the Foundation Perspective we discovered

the survival focused Intervention --> Negotiation --> Modification --

> Solution cycle. Both cycles are necessary in organizations to

support and sustain development; they are like two sides of a coin.One cannot exist without the other. When the Emergent andFoundation Perspectives build on and support each other, anorganization engages in a learning and developing process. Itbecomes sustainable because continuous improvement andtransformation are simultaneously supported (see Figure 6).

Figure 6: Emergent and Foundation cycles

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It is possible to look at both perspectives as polarities. When taken toan extreme, The Emergent perspective reveals self-organizationalcharacteristics including uncertainty, creativity, generativity, and newpossibilities. Similarly, when the pressure is on, the Foundationperspective could reveal mechanistic, control-focused routines, rulesand regulations that only support changes around expediency andrefinement. When we look at these two perspectives as contrastingand complimentary as the two sides of the same coin, the wholeEnterprise Pyramid models an environment of both chaos andimmediacy. In an organization that embraces both perspectives,change is self-generated and transformational, both practical andaspiring. Exploring both perspectives and their relationships creates adevelopmental approach to organization building and alignment (seeFigure 7). In such organizations, it is possible to look at long termstrategy and be flexible and dynamic while taking short term actions.

Foundation



Perspective Emergent Perspective

Training

ImprovingAnalyzingImitating

Self Development

RealizingVisioningCreating

Results

PlanningImprovingControlling

Business Development

StrategizingRealizingValuing

Programs

AnalyzingPresentingControlling

Organization

Development

VisioningLearningValuing

Information

ImitatingPlanning

Presenting

Knowledge Development

CreatingStrategizing

Learning


Fig. 7. Contrasting and complementary perspectives of

development in enterprises

An emergent approach (with intentions of business, knowledge,organization and self development) allows for clarity of vision andvalues, vision based strategy, creativity, and learning leading to therealization of enterprise goals. A foundation approach (with intentionsof results, information, programs and training) allows for workableplans, good market analysis, meaningful presentations, good controlstructures and focus on continuous improvement.

Emergent approaches which ignore requirements for short termgains, structures and systems and only pay attention to creativity,fluidity, flexibility and individual responsibility can self-destruct. Onecompany, Virtual Reality Systems, was started with very little seedcapital. In order to secure more, the owner put his patents up assecurity. Lenders foreclosed and took the patents. The owner lost out.More effective attention to the foundation might have saved hisposition.



If there is inadequate attention to the tactical and short term, leaderscan lose support from key stakeholders or simply lose track of thebottom line. When people stop creating and the market is no longerenthusiastic about its products and services, an emergentorganization without suitable control mechanisms in place becomesunable to deal with new market realities and disappears. Ourinnovations need the support of our structures. Our structures need tosupport our innovations.

On the other hand, the foundation approach based organization hasdifficulty adopting to rapid changes in the marketplace. For example,Diablo printer company was one of the premiere companiessupplying daisy-wheel printers connected to personal computers inthe 1980s. They had excellent quality products, world classmanufacturing facilities and the support of Xerox behind them.Markets moved on and the laser printers and (later) ink jet printerstook over the market leadership and all their quality did not save themfrom extinction.

From this brief analysis we learned that each perspective has torespect and support the other. Without the support of the one, theother collapses. When both perspectives are supported in anorganization, it could truly become a learning organization eventhough we are still to find one such company in reality. We were quitepleased that our pyramid building led not only to a organization designframework but also created shared strategy, processes and, mostimportantly, shared meaning with deeper alignment among the threeof us.

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How Has the Pyramid Building Approach Influenced Our Own

Work?

The Emergent Perspective is very useful in identifying whereresistance and potential lie for future development. We have learnedto include and transcend self development as an integral part ofbusiness, knowledge and organization development activities.

The Enterprise Pyramid helped us focus our attention on criticalissues. We ask ourselves in engaging with each other and with ourclients, questions about our intentions (Why are we engaged in thisprocess?), the topics for exploration (Is it necessary to follow this pathor should we approach the problem differently?), the possibilities fortransformation (Does this process include all the parties andtranscend their goals and objectives or is it a stop-gap process toreduce damage while we find an alternative?) and the means fordiffusion (Did we include suitable communication processes andstructures to let our clients learn and use what they learned with us



themselves?). We have used the Enterprise Pyramid to help us clarifyour relationships and roles with clients, as well as to explore client-centered activity. Building this pyramid has helped our collectiveenterprise development strategy by including and transcending ourindividual approaches in addition to clarifying our individual strengthsand interdependencies. It has helped us clarify our aspirations andattend to the immediate needs of our association.

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Application of This Approach in Other Organizations

In over four years of using this approach in a wide variety of contextsand for a wide variety of purposes, our clients have found it to be astimulus in confronting complexity and integrating diverseperspectives. In building over fifty pyramids in organizations, we couldsee that this approach has much broader application than weoriginally intended. We found the Pyramid Building Approach to beuseful in developing shared meaning and alignment. It is also valuablein helping clients to

think systemically,explore ideas and build alignment,surface and explore differences,communicate and share understanding,focus efforts,design strategies, andevaluate results.

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Conclusions

The pyramid building approach provides a fresh way for thinkingabout complex systems and for dynamically aligning people,processes, and strategy for purposeful action. We found that thisapproach is very useful in developing agreement and alignment in notonly a three-person team like ours, but also in the complex,ambiguous, polarized, and high-tension environments found in largeorganizations. At the root of this utility is the approaches' potency insupporting individuals and teams in clarifying their intentions, theactions necessary for carrying out these intentions, and the outcomesthey wish to achieve.

Clients have reported major benefits in using Pyramid Building. Theyhave structured their work more effectively, developed strategies,organized action in a complex context that has become moreunderstandable to them. Whatever their purpose for using the PyramidBuilding Approach, the end result included clarity of intention, strategy



for action, and alignment in teams. Learning and discovery becomemore lucid. Most importantly, the members of their teams,organizations, and stakeholders have become more aligned in theirwork together.

Organizations need to continue to develop models and methods thatenable them to understand dynamic relationships among complexsets of variables. Change efforts risk being cosmetic or inadequateunless organizations are able to account for the complex web ofinfluences among strategies, processes, and people. The PyramidBuilding Approach (both as a systems model and holistic method)supports heightened awareness, increased clarity of perspective, andalignment among organization members in the face of complexity.

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E-Mail: Prasad Kaipa, [email protected], Chris Newham,[email protected], or Russ Volckmann [email protected]

You can also read other articles and materials related to pyramids:

An Interview with Tom Grant about Pyramid Building in Ford Motor Company

Enterprise Development: Creating Shared Meaning through Pyramid Building... to gain more knowledge about how we use this pyramid (and developclient specific pyramids) in our work.

Instructions on creating your own Enterprise Pyramid that is described inthe articles above. (under preparation)

Do you want to know what others think of pyramid building processes andtheir applications in organizations? Read the comments from Chaos: ANewsletter of the Communities of the Future, Fall 1997

You can also download the article, 'The Art of Accomplishment' thatexplores cornerstones of accomplishment in individuals and organizations.Download document formats: MS Word Mac or MS Word Windows.

You can send any comments or suggestions by clicking here:[email protected]

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