View: The Alignment Trap

I first heard of the alignment trap from a talk by Kevlin Henney.

Original article: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/avoiding-the-alignment-trap-in-it/

Summary: many software organizations are in the bottom-left "maintenance zone" quadrant below. They're relatively ineffective and not aligned with business priorities. But at least their costs are low.

Organizations would like to be in the top-right quadrant, "enabled growth", where their costs are even lower than maintenance zone costs but the value they provide is much higher. However, they can't just jump over there. Given that they have to move through one of the other quadrants first, which one should they pick?

Many orgs choose to go "up and then right": get the software team aligned with business objectives, and assume that effectiveness will naturally follow. This doesn't work. These orgs get stuck in the "alignment trap" quadrant: their costs increase, but the net value they produce is lower compared to the "maintenance zone".

It's much better to go "right and then up". If you first make the software team more effective, their costs go down ("well-oiled IT"). Then they can easily move to "enabled growth".

alignment trap

TODO: get the rights to this image or replace it with my own.

Why does the alignment trap happen?

My personal theory: the alignment trap is a simple consequence of the definition of "alignment".

"Alignment" is business jargon, but what it really means is "importance". If software teams are aligned with the business, then by definition the things they are working on are important to the business. Business objectives will be met, or fail to be met, based on what the software teams accomplish. Real money is at stake.

Because of this, the business is much more likely to pour money into alignment-trapped projects that appear to be at risk of failure. That's why aligned, ineffective IT is so expensive.

It is also easy to explain why, if you're in the alignment trap, it's easier to move down to "well-oiled IT" before moving to "enabled growth". Software teams in the alignment trap are under a lot of pressure to deliver, and pressure is not conducive to learning. Making the team less aligned with business objectives—i.e. giving them less important things to work on—creates space for learning. Once that learning translates into improved effectiveness, the team can take on more responsibility and move to the "enabled growth" quadrant.

Further Reading