How the

Chief Strategy Officer

Drives Multi–Axis Alignment
 Table of Contents

Start with Vertical Alignment 4

Recognize that Bureaucracies Inhibit Alignment  6

How to Formalize Processes That

Create Horizontal Alignment in 3 Steps 8
Catch-Ball
Make Key Results Transparent
Implement a Cadence, Synchronize on Schedule

Master the Collaboration Practices

That Create Horizontal Alignment 11
Connect Your OKRs
Create a “Container” for People to Collaborate

Ensure People Doing the Work

Own Horizontal Coordination 12

Use Smart Technology To Support

Horizontal Alignment  12
Don’t Cheap-Out Now, when Alignment is
More Difficult and More Important than ever
Drive Fearless Ideation and Brainstorming
Select the Right OKR Management Platform

Horizontal Alignment for the Win 14

How the Chief Strategy Officer Drives Multi–Axis Alignment 2

For Missions that Matter
 The Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) role is challenging

Obviously, producing a strategy, or strategy development, as it is called, is a

crucial component of the role, but the best strategy absent the organizational
ability to align to it and deliver it is about as useful as a lousy strategy.

Thus, strategy deployment and strategy execution are essential capabilities

central to the success of the CSO and the enterprise. One of the reasons the
CSO role is so challenging is many organizations are designed in a manner
that makes coordination and collaboration simultaneously both crucial and
very difficult.

The alignment of people and work to strategic objectives is one of the

most powerful and important superpowers of Objectives and Key Results
methodology (OKRs).

For OKRs to bring focus to strategic objectives and create connections across
departments to maximize organizational effectiveness, the Chief Strategy
Officer (CSO) and OKR Champions (OKR Champions are primary facilitators
of the OKR process) must ensure people align horizontally as well as
vertically. Click here to learn more about the role of the OKR Champion).

How the Chief Strategy Officer Drives Multi–Axis Alignment 3

For Missions that Matter
 Start with Vertical Alignment
To align the work that people do with the overall strategy, there must be a
top-level definition of strategic objectives to provide a vertical component to
aligning OKRs.

That said, we caution organizations to avoid rigidly cascading objectives

down through layers of the organization. Avoid the mechanistic cascading of
objectives from executives to managers to teams and team members that was
common practice with Management by Objectives (MBO) based goal setting
in the “bad old days”.

Why is this form of cascading so destructive?

Organizational cascading creates goals that are:

 Suboptimal – While the CEO’s objective might make perfect sense,

once this objective gets deconstructed and cascaded down several
layers of the organization, its descendant at the front-line team or
individual level will often be unrealistic or misdirecting. It certainly will
not be inspiring or motivating.

 Slow and Late - Translating and passing goals down the many layers
of a traditional bureaucracy takes a very long time. It is not unusual in
large organizations for the annual goal-setting process to take months.
You might work a quarter with no objectives.

How the Chief Strategy Officer Drives Multi–Axis Alignment 4

For Missions that Matter
  Inflexible - Once the effort and pain to cascade goals down the
bureaucracy are finally complete, nobody wants to touch them again.
Any change forces a resetting of all layers below. It’s easier to plod
along with the old irrelevant goals and game them to satisfaction rather
than produce better ones.

 Resented – Knowledge workers don’t like being told what to do.

They especially dislike being told how to do their jobs. When they are
dictated goals and tasks through an impersonal and bureaucratic
process, they do not feel committed to, nor accountable for, delivering
those goals to the degree they would if they had a role in developing
them.

Lack of ownership of goals will produce poor performance and

disengagement. View this video for an introduction to the work of Daniel
Pink to understand knowledge worker motivation, particularly the essential
component of worker autonomy (as well as mastery and purpose) in
maximizing the effectiveness of knowledge workers.

OKRs done properly have an organic, bottom-up dimension.

How the Chief Strategy Officer Drives Multi–Axis Alignment 5

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 The best and most effective OKRs are produced by the people who will
actually do the work.

Effective knowledge workers will first consider the strategic and departmental
priorities to create their own OKRs. Then they consider how their role, skills,
experience, and available resources can maximize their impact.

Knowledge workers will take greater ownership of, and commitment to

objectives they themselves create. This will motivate them to actively monitor
and manage their OKRs, taking timely action to address risks or changing
circumstances.

Recognize that Bureaucracies Inhibit Alignment

Vertical alignment is essential because the company’s strategy provides the
guiding light for the entire organization. Vertical alignment, while necessary,
is not sufficient, especially in large firms adhering to traditional organizational
designs, because functional silos effectively maximize dependencies while
simultaneously inhibiting collaboration to manage them effectively.

Traditional organizational designs are a holdover from the “scientific

management” school of the industrial era. They are characterized by
structures that were originally designed to maximize the productivity of people
performing repetitive manual tasks. Work specialization was one important
means to efficiency.

By making laborers as interchangeable as the cogs they

were building, training time was reduced, and labor
costs dropped along with the skill levels required to hire
workers.

Once the time-and-motion men had completed their studies

of a particular task, the workers had very little opportunity for
further thinking, experimenting, or suggestion-making. Taylorism
was criticized for turning the worker into an “automaton” or
“machine”, making work monotonous and unfulfilling by doing
one small and rigidly defined piece of work instead of using
complex skills with the whole production process done by one
person.

Many large, non-digital-native enterprises are still organized around functional

silos - a legacy of that specialization of labor from the industrial age. The
problem with that legacy is that we are no longer operating in a labor-intensive
industrial economy. The modern economy is dominated by knowledge
workers whose creativity, innovation, and agility enable companies to
compete and succeed.

How the Chief Strategy Officer Drives Multi–Axis Alignment 6

For Missions that Matter
 Knowledge work is amplified and accelerated through
the seamless collaboration of many roles and functions,
whereas silos and hierarchies conspire to inhibit
teamwork and collaboration.

Employees simply do not collaborate and communicate well across silos. It

seems obvious that collaboration, alignment, and performance improve by
reducing layers in the hierarchy and optimizing organizational design laterally
to deliver value to customers, rather than vertically along functional silos.

The transformational opportunity lies in enabling and

encouraging individuals and teams to organize around customer
and company (or other stakeholders’) priorities, irrespective and
independent of vertical or horizontal boundaries.

Unfortunately, a lot of organizations struggle to organize and optimize for

stakeholder value. Legacy organizational designs and mindsets inevitably
aggravate misalignment, discoordination, and a plethora of dependency
management problems.

Fortunately, we have some great strategy execution practices, like OKRs and
horizontal alignment practices and tools, outlined below, to mitigate those
problems and improve performance quickly.

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 How to Formalize Processes That
Create Horizontal Alignment in 3 Steps

Catch-Ball
There is a lean strategy deployment process that was popular for a while,
called Hoshin Kanri.

Its primary flaw is that it is a very top-down process, but it had some
interesting and useful practices. One was called “catch-ball”, and it involved
a process where a boss would “pitch” an objective or goal to his or her
underling, who would then clarify it, modify it, adopt it, maybe with conditions,
and throw it back.

Catch-ball also worked for identifying and communicating cross-departmental

dependencies.

For example:

Goal: Sales will increase quarterly revenue to xyz 

Dependency: Marketing must produce nn leads.

Re-creating a version of catch-ball for communicating OKRs horizontally

across the organization will encourage identification of dependencies, alert
the other party, and potentially define key results so each could track the
other transparently to ensure alignment of effort.

How the Chief Strategy Officer Drives Multi–Axis Alignment 8

For Missions that Matter
 A Hoshin-Kanri Strategy Deployment Template

Make Key Results Transparent

Speaking of transparency, it’s essential to create maximum access to near-
real-time accurate Key Results (KRs) performance. Ideally, these KRs are
updated automatically from the system of record. KR performance data
should be transparent throughout the organization so everyone can see what
outcomes everyone else is trying to achieve, how well they’re progressing (or
not), and spot any potential coordination or dependency problems.

Implement a Cadence, Synchronize on Schedule

Another process construct to consider is implementing a global cadence
with regularly scheduled (and mandatory) synchronization events. A cadence
provides a rhythm to work and facilitates measurement. Synchronization of
processes or work in periodic “official” measurement or inspection events
enables (forces) different components or workstreams to prove they are
integrated and in sync.

Lean process gurus figured out long ago that the only reliable way to KNOW
the status of complex programs or systems was to mandate full integration
and quality validation on a regular schedule. Synchronizing work streams
results in early risk identification, fewer defects, less waste, and fewer delays.

A strategy-execution process leveraging OKRs provides a great vehicle

for establishing a cadence of updates - weekly updates to KRs are often
considered a reasonable maximum for measurement (for KRs that are not
automated and real-time).

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For Missions that Matter
 Synchronizations at the local (or component), group (system), and enterprise
levels can be set at whatever frequency is appropriate to your work. For
example, the Quarterly Business Review process should include time to:

 Evaluate strategy execution effectiveness measured, in part,

by OKR success:

• Review progress on last quarters’ objectives.

• Formulate or update next quarters’ OKRs.

 Align next quarters’ OKRs to corporate strategy and also

 Seize the moment to align and coordinate OKRs across the

organization laterally with teams and functions that influence
your success.

 Retrospect on the OKR process in general, and on how

strategy execution could be improved generally.

Another proven coordination process is the tactical coordination ceremony

(scrum of scrums is one implementation). One representative from each team
or workgroup comes together, at a regular interval, to share with the other
teams’ representatives three things:

 What their team accomplished since the last meeting;

 What they plan to do by the next meeting;

 Any risks or challenges inhibiting realization of their objectives.

Ideally, it’s facilitated to be a fast, highly productive format. Follow-up
conversations, planning, and further coordination are arranged immediately
after the formal meeting. This approach can scale up to several additional
levels as needed, with a representative from each group of teams coordinating
together at the next level. For example, the tactical coordination
levels could be:

 Level 1: Several teams collaborating on a project.

 Level 2: Several project groups collaborating on a program.

 Level 3: Several programs that roll up to a big strategic initiative.

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 Master the Collaboration Practices
That Create Horizontal Alignment
Connect Your OKRs
Now that we have work cadences and we’re synchronized on, say, quarterly
events, where we all review OKR performance and refine the next quarter’s
OKRs, let’s look ahead one or more quarters with the specific goal of
identifying and “tagging” the OKRs of the groups you’ll depend on.

When other groups tag one of our OKRs or ask us to own a KR on their behalf
so they can successfully deliver their objective, we are setting the stage to
accomplish several important benefits:

 We have identified a dependency, alerted each party to the

dependency, and set the stage to manage the dependency to
completion.

 We have set the stage to debate prioritization and focus – given

scarce capacity, should we deprioritize our parochial OKRs in favor
of serving the dependent team that’s trying to assign us a new KR?
The organization’s higher-level OKRs should inform the debate.

Having identified, negotiated, and accepted accountability for the

dependency, we have several means to track and manage it: you might create
one or more linked OKRs, co-owned OKRs, or maybe it’s sufficient for each
of you to accept a KR on the other group’s objective. Use the lightest weight
process that 1. Permits transparency of true status, and 2. Ensures amid the
busy quarter we keep one another in mind.

Create a “Container” for People to Collaborate

Large-scale enterprise agile dealt with a lot of dependency management and
collaboration challenges scaling up in large traditional enterprises. IT was the
first frontier. Old school corporate IT shops were (often still are) depressing
bastions of industrial-era org design; IT’s functional silos are towering and
formidable edifices with powerful incentives to optimize locally for their
parochial benefit.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail

How the Chief Strategy Officer Drives Multi–Axis Alignment 11

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 Practices like Obeya room and release (also known as “big-room” and
“program increment”) planning meetings produced amazingly effective
facilitation techniques to help large numbers of participants from many
specialty functions to collaborate
and plan.

Key practices include relentless reminders of the high-level objectives driving

the program or initiative, prioritization, and value assignment techniques,
roughly-right-sizing and estimation practices to balance precision with
planning time horizons, mandating full integration and validation, and
above all, they produced great techniques for dependency identification,
notification, and tracking.

Ensure People Doing the Work

Own Horizontal Coordination
Engage the people who will be doing the work in the process of sequencing
the work and identifying and managing dependencies.

If you can’t create cross-functional teams, so everyone on the team is

individually and collectively accountable and owns the same OKR, overcome
that organizational design obstacle by ensuring all dependent teams,
functions, and individuals collaborate efficiently and effectively with a clear
guidepost of the higher-level shared objective and clear measures of success
(key results).

Then, provide the meeting and collaboration context and “container” and
provide the facilitation structure and tools to ensure they align quickly.

Prescription: Implement effective strategy deployment

and strategy execution down to where the work gets
done and laterally to all who must cooperate to deliver.

Use Smart Technology To Support

Horizontal Alignment
Don’t Cheap-Out Now, when Alignment is
More Difficult and More Important than ever
Good technology works in support of good process; good technology
facilitates human collaboration but can never replace it.

Collaboration- good or bad- is often a reflection of another, really tough “C”

word – culture.

Whatever your organization’s internal culture, state of the art collaboration

tools makes alignment and coordination easier and more effective. In

How the Chief Strategy Officer Drives Multi–Axis Alignment 12

For Missions that Matter
 the pandemic, we all learned that doing everything in person isn’t always
possible. Virtual workforces, gig work, and globalization have all made it
more difficult to stay aligned with coworkers, but there’s been a consequent
explosion of increasingly amazing collaboration technologies.

Drive Fearless Ideation and Brainstorming

Ideation and collaboration whiteboard-type software evolved almost instantly
to support a plethora of templates for every imaginable kind of meeting or
creative exercise. Remote/virtual facilitation became the hottest new coaching
skill, and many of our templates went from flip charts and stickie notes to
digital tools in days.

Some impressive templates have been designed to guide and support highly
facilitated training and workshop events for strategy deployment/execution
and transformation engagements. Of course, the best strategy templates
support strategic effectiveness via the creation and management of OKRs.

“Big Room Planning for OKRs Template” Credit: Mural

Select the Right OKR Management Platform

As our meetings evolved, the challenges of ensuring alignment and
transparency in this new paradigm forced an OKR software evolution as well.
Effective horizontal alignment requires an OKR management platform that
can assign, link, and track OKRs for any formal or ad-hoc team or workgroup
irrespective of org charts, reporting, function or department.

OKR tracking should be automated through interfaces to systems of record,

thereby ensuring accuracy and timeliness. Everyone in the business unit, from
leaders to workers, should have access to the OKRs that drive and guide their
success, and all should be updating and rolling up or aggregating, vertically
and laterally, the key results that impact their work and that of others.

How the Chief Strategy Officer Drives Multi–Axis Alignment 13

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 Horizontal Alignment for the Win
Perhaps your organization has made conscious and deliberate attempts to
increase fitness and adaptability for the digital age, including a modern digital
organizational design with fewer layers and more empowered cross-functional
teams. Congratulations CSO! Excelling in your job is easier because strategy
deployment and execution are faster and more effective because silos, with
all their parochial local optimizations, are a thing of the past. Dependency
management and knowledge worker and workgroup alignment are easier than
ever, but even in the ideal modern digital organization, some of the techniques
above will be useful – try some out, experiment.

CSO, if you are struggling in an organization reflecting legacy 19th-century

thinking, aligning and coordinating for effective strategy execution are
inevitably the hardest parts of succeeding in your role. For you, exploring
and testing these techniques will be an invaluable starting point for improving
horizontal alignment and consequently execution, effectiveness, and
adaptability. I hope for you and your organization it won’t be very long until
your leadership removes the organizational impediments to effective strategy
execution.

How the Chief Strategy Officer Drives Multi–Axis Alignment 14

For Missions that Matter
From Confusion to Clarity
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