Putting in place the prerequisites for change: Aligning your 5 ducks
Aligning Duck 1
Recall that Duck 1, Comprehension: requires that all members of the team responsible for designing and implementing the change must share the same understanding of the change objectives.
Two people can share an objective but have completely different perspectives on how the objective will be achieved, as well as what will be the consequences of achieving the objective, including what will be their roles in achieving the objective and what will be the consequences of failure.
… And there will be other ways people perceive the impact of a change on how they will live their lives and how others will live theirs.
Different perceptions on any of these dimensions can cause disaster. If, after having started working to make a change happen, one or more key people responsible for the change start saying, “That’s not what I agreed to make happen.” Boom; chaos. And looming failure …
How do you get all the members of a team to have the exact same understanding of all the objectives their project? The leader starts by calling a mandatory meeting on the subject and then asking every member of the team to describe in their own words:
the project objectives
any project objectives that may be assumed but are not specified
what would be the consequences of achieving all the stated and assumed objectives
what might not be okay to happen if the project is successfully completed
how will each team member feel if and when the project is successfully completed
what each person sees as their official role in seeing that the project is successful
what each person sees as their unofficial but important roles in seeing the project is successful
what would be failure
how would failure feel
After letting everyone answer these questions for themselves in their own words in front of everyone else, then the leader gives her, his or their answers. Then the project leader says, “These are the things I heard that make me worry that we might not be totally aligned in how we see this project progressing.” After this summary the leader asks, “what makes you worry that I did not mention?”
After receiving all this input, the challenge is for the leader to facilitate a discussion where the team agrees to adjust the objectives of the project and any constraints on what they plan to do, so that some or all of the bad things team members worry about are less likely to happen. Document these understandings!
The leader then again says what still worries them and asks the team for their remaining worries. The team goes another round of adjustment to the objectives and the project constraints.
Ultimately, the outcome of these discussions should result in every team member feeling that any further aligning will be counterproductive. They should also feel good about their much deeper shared understanding of what the project is about and how it can and cannot get done.
Anyone who is not part of all these discussions should not be on the team; this alignment is that important.
Keeping Duck 1 aligned
Frequently, unforeseen circumstances create misalignments of Duck 1. For example:
Somebody can no longer be on the team and their replacement sees things differently.
The visualization, planning or discussions around what it would take to achieve the objectives prove inaccurate.
The sponsorship of the team changes and the new sponsor wants changes.
A competitor or some other outside influence may render some of all of the project objectives worthless.
There are other unforeseen things that could go wrong that are outside the control of the team or may have just been initially missed. Everyone on the team should be alert to mutual changes in attitudes about where the project is heading. When any of these things happen or when there is some change in attitudes about the direction, Duck 1 needs to be realigned. The document that the team created describing their Duck 1 alignment can be the starting point.
The longer Duck 1 is misaligned, the harder it is to get it back aligned. Misalignment creates frustrations, hidden feelings and emotions, which can build and boil over. It results in wasted efforts and resources. It causes projects to go off course.
Aligning Duck 2
Recall Duck 2, Motivation: All members of the team implementing the change must be motivated to see that the change is successfully accomplished.
Just because every member of the team agrees on:
what the end objectives are,
what success and failure would feel like and
what special actions and constraints get added to the project to achieve alignment,
does not mean every member is motivated to the extent required to make the project successful.
Any project will always be just one of many things a team member is motivated to see happen, and it may not be important enough to get the investment of attention, sweat, and dedication to make sure the project is a success, no matter what.
Because Duck 1 gets aligned first, the leader starts out with important information on what each member will feel if and when the project is a success or a failure. The leader also knows some things each member doesn’t want to see happen. These help the leader understand some—not all—of the motivations of each member.
To align Duck 2 a leader should hold a series of 1:1 meetings with each member of the team, asking:
What do you aspire to get from playing a key role in making this project a success?
What other things are you involved in that could get in the way of you doing anything and everything possible to make our startup a success?
What can I do to help you have more time or enough time to make this an exciting and rewarding experience?
What a leader needs to get beyond with these questions are superficial answers along the line of, “It’s my job to do my best for you.”
You do not want your project to be just about doing a job. As we described in sprint 11 on Motivating Others, you want and need the people you work with to feel helping you has an important purpose. You need to go beyond just building a sense of purpose to building a strong one-to-one relationship with each member of your project team.
These are important people, and you want to use your Relationship Building skills from sprints 8 and 9 and10 to build powerful relationships as described in sprint 10 and its blog “Powerful startup relationships require a mix of cooperation, competition and retreat.” With a strong relationship built on many shared objectives, each shared objective is an additional motivation for the teammate to want to see a critical or important project succeed.
While you may have a good sense of many of your teammates’ work-based motivations—we assume you talk about them—you may not have a good sense of their motivations to achieve certain things outside of work. It may be none of your business what your teammates do when not at work, but it is important that they have a sense that you care about them being as successful in their private life as in their work life.
Keeping Duck 2 aligned
People’s circumstances change. Be sensitive to your teammates that seem to struggle with keeping up with their work and deliverables. As soon as you notice a change, ask them what has changed. If they say “nothing” then press them on what you can do to get them remotivated to achieve at the level they had been. People’s personal lives can be a higher priority than work—and that is okay—but if that is the case then cooperatively move the person off the project team and bring on somebody with somewhat similar skills who is excited to be part of the team.
Aligning Duck 3
Recall Duck 3, Skills: The project team must possess or have under their control the skills necessary to design and implement the change.
A skill you may recall from sprint 7 is an ability to perform a prescribed task. What Duck 3 says is for a change to take place or a project to succeed that the project team must have the ability to deploy people with the necessary skills to do all the tasks that will be required. Ultimately this duck requires the project team to:
Visualize as best they can what steps or tasks will need to be taken, in what order for the project to be completed
List the skills of the people that will be assigned to do those tasks or take those steps
Make a list of skills under the control of the project team and which people have or control those skills (the skill set could be controlled by a contractor or consultant).
There can be no missing skills. For a startup with just a few people, complex tasks like making detailed CAD drawings may not exist on the team so the task will require hiring a freelance CAD designer or technician. Put the freelancer’s name or the name of the contractor onto the list. If a skill assignment is unfilled then that adds huge risk for the entire team and project.
Small inexperienced teams, as are typical of many startups, make it is easy to miss realizing some of the skills that will be needed. Typical misses include:
Hiring skills (we will soon have a sprint about hiring and firing)
Training skills (how do you effectively teach somebody how to do things differently)
Communicating to large audience skills as may be required to align Duck 5. It starts with basic communication skills as we discussed in sprint 9, but doing it for large, dispersed groups requires additional sub-skills.
Bookkeeping
Customer service, as in keeping customers happy 24/7
Complex or technical support tasks like CAD drawings
Keeping Duck 3 aligned
People leave, and teams will almost always realize they missed a skill; Duck 3 often gets loose. The leader needs to ask teammates frequently about whether they sense they are missing skills to complete their project. Keeping the list of skills and who has those skills under their control helps in keeping Duck 3 aligned.
Aligning Duck 4
Recall Duck 4, Resources: All the resources required to perform the project must be made available to the team as they are requested.
All projects need resources. Resources can take many forms, and some resources can be challenging to find or find enough of. Resources fall into the following categories:
monetary, as in money, tokens, donations.
energy, as in electricity, power, charged batteries.
time, as in, “is there enough time for people or equipment to do the actions expected of them?” In the case of people, the resource is the time a person promises to dedicate to the project. Equipment time needs to include set up and perhaps instruction time.
information, as in, “what specific data are needed for us to take some required actions?”
regulatory, as in, “how will third parties be available as and when needed to provide critical permissions to proceed?”
space, as in, “is there enough space available for people, equipment and materials?”
materials, as in “are there enough materials, particularly specialty materials on hand?”
equipment, in other words, what equipment will be necessary to perform required actions
Finally, contracted support services like contractors for equipment installation, or props, signage, or auditors.
The project team needs to think through all the resources they will require to perform all the tasks associated with completing the project. They need to list the resources and where the resources will come from and from whom they will get it. The people responsible for providing the resource must agree on when and how they will provide what is required.
Do not accept casual assurances of support for critical resources! One of the worst things that can happen to a project, is for a critical resource to not be available as promised and expected. This destroys momentum AND trust AND moral and most projects do not recover from this. Get all resource commitments in writing, with the consequences for not providing the resource clearly described.
Keeping Duck 4 aligned.
Hopefully all the written commitments will help prevent a critical resource from not appearing, or from disappearing when required. If there are people whose commitment you do not trust, put in place a backup or work-around plan.
What’s most likely is that a startup team will not know all the resources they will need. Duck 4 gets misaligned when someone realizes a critical resource is missing from the alignment list. The realignment only happens once the team scrambles and finds the resource or figures out a work-around so the resource was not needed as feared.
Aligning Duck 5
Recall Duck 5, Communication: Everyone impacted by the change must understand its importance.
Duck 5 is a tricky one, but it is essential. What you do not want is to put in place all the desired changes only to have no one actually do anything differently. All the effort, money and resources invested in making the change would be wasted! Yet most businesses report that up to 95% of their improvement projects fail, and the biggest cause of failure is the change being rejected by those impacted.
We repeat what we described in sprint 12 How to Lead Change:
“it is critical to get all the people NOT on the project team that are impacted by the change to be motivated to embrace the change and not to publicly resist it. This Duck 5 is about the need to align everyone that you want to do things differently than they are used to and therefore will be naturally resistant to what you want. To them you must communicate the importance of the change to:
the organization and its mission,
the people they work alongside within the organization, and
their ability to master their job.”
The description of the importance of the change is made to appeal to the general human motivations described in sprint 11 on Motivating Others. It is also based upon what was discussed in sprints 8 and 9 on Relationship Building and Communicating. Duck 5 requires that the leader communicates the importance of the change and then receives feedback that the message was accurately received, understood and agreed upon.
Creating a shared understanding of the importance of a change makes it much more difficult for an individual to fight the change in the open, or even covertly. If even only a small percentage of employees and stakeholders do not feel the change is important then it will be poorly implemented and the potential benefits of the change will be lost.
The challenging parts of this alignment are:
Figuring out all the different constituents (described below) that will be impacted. This includes constituencies like beta testers, actual customers, investors, contractors, suppliers, and—if applicable—people following you on social media.
Determining what aspects of the change will worry them or make them feel uncomfortable.
Constructing descriptions of the importance of the change in specific terms for each constituency, which speaks to the importance of the change for them as described above.
Getting accurate feedback that the importance of the change has been accepted.
Composing and delivering updates on how the activities to implement the change are proceeding, specifically highlighting what has and has not changed including the importance of the expected impacts.
All this can require quite a bit of communicating. Some startups figure they do this when they hire a PR firm, but PR firms usually only handle communications to customers or outside constituencies. With Duck 5, internal ones are just as important. In early-stage startups, before actually having customers, there are not too many people outside of the leadership team who are impacted. But as a startup builds capacity to actually deliver products or services to customers, the number of people and constituencies increase rapidly.
Aligning and keeping align Duck 5 can take up a large amount of time of a founder and the leadership team. The messaging about the importance of a change is only believable if it comes from somebody who is ultimately responsible for ensuring the promised impacts of the change will actually occur.
Realigning Duck 5
Consider this the prescription on how to keep Duck 5 aligned:
Compose and deliver updates to each constituency on how the activities to implement the change are proceeding. Specifically highlight what has and has not changed, including a review of the importance of the expected impacts. And ask people what they are worried about.
What are constituencies?
A constituency is a group of people that share the same benefits, interactions, and expectations associated with dealing with some organization. Constituencies exist inside and outside an organization. Here are examples of constituencies you find in growing startups:
People that perform the same job.
People who work in the same department.
People that work in the same space or geography.
People with special benefits, like probationary workers, trainees, or alumni.
Each user or customer persona is a different customer constituency.
Key decision-makers at suppliers.
Suppliers who compete to supply a specific product or service form a separate constituency.
Investors, or each class of investor if different types of investors exist.
Board of Directors.
Board of advisors.
If a change will impact the families of employees, then employee spouses are a constituency.
Clearly, people can be part to several constituencies.
It is important to realize that any of these constituencies can derail the impact of an important change, particularly if not understanding the importance of the change results in covert resistance to its implementation. Invest the time and effort to align Duck 5 and keep it aligned.