New School IT
We laugh about the stories of how we discovered the unpredictable dynamics of corporate operations as we move beyond simplistic "machine" metaphors.
Collaborating with diverse co-hosts, we explore and analyze organizations as complex, living systems. Our show challenges the "people, process, technology" cliché to help leaders navigate the gap between ambition and operational reality in the era of AI, data-driven decisions, and digital operations.
New School IT® is affiliated with SODA™, the Systemic Of Disciplined Adaptability. SODA is the operations framework for companies to cultivate and strengthen the needed discipline and adaptability to thrive in the age of AI, data-driven operations, and digital markets.
New School IT
ALIGNMENT - reality hits harder than planning
Hard work doesn’t guarantee impact. We dig into why some projects soar while others stall, and how a few simple habits create a straight line from purpose to results. The core idea is alignment, across the org chart, across functions, and across time as reality shifts.
We start by translating big ideas into clear execution, from purpose t real-life objectives that anchor the next few quarters, and results that can be measured in weeks. Using Costco as a case study, we show how an enduring purpose cascades into strategy and store‑level key results, so every team understands how their pixel sharpens the overall picture.
Do you want immediate traction? We describe how running a few checks around recomposition, spotlight logic, and reality shifts guarantees that you stay aligned with reality rather than a plan that could lead to failure.
Subscribe, share with a teammate who needs this, and leave a review with the smallest alignment habit you’ll start this week.
We've been working real hard on a map we made for all that shifted along the way. Everybody busy, everybody proud.
SPEAKER_05:But the voice gets buried when the car is loud. We're moving, but we can't say why. Who knows if we're really closer to that line in the sky? It ain't about working. It's about pulling.
SPEAKER_00:Hello, this is New School IT. How can I help you?
SPEAKER_06:Most failed projects are perfectly executed plans for a world that no longer exists. Hi everyone. Welcome back to New School IT. I'm Roland. Here's a question for you. Why does some work make us feel great while other work, even when it's important, leaves us frustrated? It usually comes down to two things. Are we and our colleagues aiming for the same outcome? And can we see early and clearly what impact our work has on the people who receive it? We call these two ideas alignment and moments of truth. Alignment is about actually executing a shared purpose. Moments of truth are the reality checks where the impact of your work becomes visible. Both done well lead to high impact results through small adjustments, and done poorly, they lead to major corrections or do-overs. Let's ground ourselves in a couple of simple analogies. Starting with moments of truth. Think of your team's work like an expedition to the North Pole. From anywhere on Earth, if you keep heading north long enough, you will eventually get there. So the strategy seems obvious. Point north. But just like at work, you can't travel in a perfectly straight line. You have to follow real paths and navigate obstacles. What matters is recalibrating often. Check your course after every twist and every workaround. Frequent checks lead to small adjustments. If you check only occasionally, you'll face expensive corrections. Wait until the end, and it might leave you with no choice but to start over. And here's the second analogy: this one for alignment. It has to happen with people that you depend on or who depend on you. Whether a child, a partner, a teammate, or a customer. Imagine walking through a busy, crowded place with someone who relies on you. You came together, but suddenly something changes. A performer blocks the path, or police is rerouting the crowd behind a barrier. If you're holding hands in that moment, staying together takes almost no effort. A small squeeze signals an adjustment in your path. You both feel it instantly and you keep going without breaking your stride. If you're not holding hands, but you're still paying attention to each other, you might get separated by a short distance. But you still have to shout over the noise and fight your way back together. It can become a stressful and disruptive situation. That's a correction. But if you're both moving independently, you eventually look up and realize that you're alone. Reconnecting may take long enough that your plans for the day are shot. That's a do-over. In this episode, we'll explore alignment, and in the next one, we'll deep dive into moments of truth.
SPEAKER_03:Please hold.
SPEAKER_06:It happens in three dimensions. First, it has to work up and down the org chart across leadership, governance, and execution layers. Second, it has to work across functions: sales, marketing, supply, factory, RD, finance, HR, IT, and any other functional experts who are involved. And third, alignment has to stay intact over time as raw inputs move through complex workflows and projects to produce real impact for the people who are paying for the work. Just a quick note on terminology. Different companies use different labels, but the logic and the concepts matter, not the terminology. Let's go through each one of them, starting with alignment across the orc chart. It starts with a clear articulation of purpose. Think of purpose as timeless. It's true on Monday, it's true next summer, and it's true when a project moves into operations. After purpose is clear, it is then decomposed into strategy. The strategy changes slowly and gets adjusted year after year, commonly with a three to five year horizon. And that's typically owned by functions. Strategy is then broken down into objectives. They are usually managed by departments within those functions and used to stay on track quarter after quarter. Finally, working teams and individuals execute the work that actually produces the results to achieve those objectives. Delivering one of those results typically takes a week or two. This kind of alignment is like zooming into an image. Purpose is the full picture, and actual results are individual pixels that create it. Each pixel has its own color, and everyone contributes to the quality of the picture that comes out. When alignment is clear, the image is sharp. As misalignment increases, the picture becomes blurrier and noisier, especially if everyone starts working harder in the wrong direction. Here's a real life example from a successful U.S. company, Costco. Their purpose is, in quotes, provide our members with quality goods and services at the lowest possible price. That statement has not changed since 1983. Costco's strategy is to drive extreme value across a limited selection, which creates purchasing power and operational efficiencies that allow those low prices that fulfill Costco's purpose. Now, an objective that aligns with both the strategy and the purpose might be over the next nine months, we will improve inventory velocity by 30%. And the key result of that objective could be in our Oakland warehouse, we reduced the time from the receiving dock to the store shelf from 24 to 16 hours. In this example, Costco decomposed its company-wide purpose into a concrete operational strategy. Think about how many functions share in this merchandising, purchasing, supply chain, vendor management, and each warehouse. The objective was shared by specific departments within each one of those functions. Category management, pricing, cold chain logistics, distribution center planning, warehouse receiving, and store inventory management. At the most detailed level of alignment, the specific key results are owned by small teams in each store. For example, the planning, receiving, and inventory teams in Oakland, and each one of the other 900 stores. I'd like to give you a practical exercise to apply this in a way that will help you. First, remember the companies have different names for these concepts, so it'd be useful for you to map the ideas into the language that your company already uses. Now, here's a simple way to test how well the org layers around you are aligned. We'll call it the recomposition test. Pick an important deliverable you're working on right now. Real work, something you know matters. Then ask yourself these four questions. One, what immediate impact does my work create when I'm done? Two, how does it support the stated objective of my department in the current quarter or two? Three, how does it support the strategy of my function over the next 12 months? And finally, does all of that connect to the company's purpose? If the alignment is clear to you at every level, you can keep going with confidence because you understand how your pixels contribute to the big picture. If the threat breaks down, or you hit a vague slogan instead of a real answer, that's a signal that working harder is unlikely to improve the outcome. Getting clarity and alignment will.
SPEAKER_01:Please hold.
SPEAKER_03:It ain't about working harder.
SPEAKER_06:Okay, let's move on to the second dimension: cross-functional alignment. If the first one is about the line of sight through the depth of the org chart, the second one is about the breadth of the organization. It's one thing for the VP of logistics and the warehouse team to be aligned, but if they're not also aligned with buyers and merchandising or analysts and finance, outcomes will suffer. I like the analogy of a symphony for this kind of cross-functional alignment. The purpose is in the sheet music. It's the same for everyone. Each section plays a different instrument. Violins are not better than horns, they just have a different part to play. However, if the string section plays at a different tempo than the brass, you don't get music, you get noise. This kind of tempo mismatch happens naturally in companies because of spotlight logic, which we described in some detail in the previous episode. As a quick refresher, each function can only see clearly within its own spotlight. And while everyone makes rational, well-intentioned decisions across functions and teams, those decisions don't always add up to the right impact, especially if they're not actively aligned around a shared purpose. It's not a people problem. It's an unavoidable dynamic in companies. Alignment around a shared purpose creates a link to the countless spotlights. How do we best create that link? We avoid functional jargon when making plans with others. And then frequently check real-world impact to see if we have to adjust our plans. When we use our functional jargon with other teams, it can sound like a private language meant to keep them out. We'll do better if we describe our reality in simple language that connects back to our shared purpose. When you explain your work without acronyms or department-specific terms, you make it possible for others to see what's happening in your spotlight. That mutual clarity connects everyone, and it's like creating a chain that walks through the crowd hand in hand. Going back to our Costco example, the objective to improve inventory velocity would fail if teams focused only on their own spotlight logic. If merchandising adds low-volume products or purchasing over buys to reduce unit cost, they create bottlenecks that prevent the Oakland warehouse from clearing the dock in 16 hours. At Costco, alignment happened when all functions evaluated the important parts of their joint decisions together to make sure it would support the lowest possible price. Success is not measured by a single department's win, but by the real-world impact of shared decisions and execution. Here's a practical way to check the spotlight logic alignment around you. Using the same deliverable from the last exercise, look at the team before you and the team after you and the workflow. Then ask yourself these questions. Have I checked with the teams before and after me to confirm that we all understand, in simple terms, what needs to be ready and what needs to be finished to determine the real world impact of our work? What actually happened when you got this so that we can surface needed adjustments early and often? If the answer to either is no, you can improve outcome simply by moving towards a yes.
SPEAKER_01:Please hold.
SPEAKER_06:I like a video analogy for this dimension because it combines both the clear picture and the good sound that create an impact over time. Like going from the beginning to the end of a movie. The story is your purpose. It's the central theme that gives the work meaning and direction. Each outcome is a moment in that video. If the moments don't align to the overall purpose of the movie, you might appreciate strong individual scenes, but everyone in the audience will leave confused. When the moments stay true to the story, they create an impact. Maybe fear in a horror movie, suspense in a thriller, or laughs in a comedy. In real life, the reality that was true during planning starts shifting the moment the work begins. There will always be new regulations, new technologies, competitors launching new products, supply shortages, people changing roles, budget shifting, and someone making an honest mistake. These forces are constant, outside of anyone's control, and all happening at the same time. If we stay aligned only to the version of the world that exists on day one, our impact will be designed for a world that has moved on. That's why alignment across time requires the discipline to update the plan as fast as the world evolves. To do that, we need real-time information about real-world impact. When alignment slips, expenses go up, opportunities are lost, and outdated outcomes become a burden or even useless. How do you apply this in your everyday work? Here's one simple question to test your alignment with inevitable shifts in reality. What specific adjustments did we make this month based on what actually happened in the real world, not what the plan said should happen? If he can't point to any recent adjustments in response to that external feedback, you may be executing a plan or a process that's no longer relevant to today's reality. If that's the case, do this. Identify the earliest next point where the impact on the recipient could be observed. Agree with the other affected teams on which signal to use, and use that shared truth to adjust together. Then, repeat this as often as possible.
SPEAKER_01:Please hold.
SPEAKER_06:Okay, let's summarize before we wrap up. Across these three dimensions, we've outlined how alignment can multiply the impact of everyone's work. Orch chart alignment creates clarity like a sharp image. Cross-functional alignment eliminates noise, like a well-conducted symphony orchestra. And alignment over time keeps you upward relevant as reality shifts. Here's how to decide what to do with this personally. Think of a professional athlete. They can show up on game day without training, but they won't win. Alignment delivers high-impact results when they matter most, and it gives you real performance leverage. The only requirement is to apply it consistently, even when it feels inconvenient, awkward, or difficult, which it often does at the beginning. That's discipline. Doing what's right before it feels natural. If you want immediate value from this episode, run the recomposition, spotlight logic, and reality shift checks. If you spot an alignment break, fix it and see what happens. We have touched on moments of truth a few times, the points in time where real impact becomes obvious. In the next episode, we'll focus on how they work and how to use them. Until then, thanks for listening. Share the podcast. Comment freely and tune back in. I'm Roland, and this has been schoollight.
SPEAKER_03:When we're pulling together, it don't take much. Just lookin' out on a steady touch. Like a loading hands in a crowd in play. Once mom keeps a song when you don't let go of the meal, we drift the parts. It ain't about working. It's about work. Yeah, I don't tell.
SPEAKER_04:It only shows itself in what gets used, not what we tell. Did it help? Did it lie? Did it change a thing? Or was it just a hopeful swing?
SPEAKER_03:Catch it early, you can be in the line. Wait too long, you're back at the starting line.
