Aligning Strategy, Processes, and People in Organizations

7/14/2014
Aligning Strategy, Processes, and People in Organizations
- PYRAMIDS MENU -
Application of Pyramid Building in Organizations:

by Prasad Kaipa, Chris Newham and Russ Volckmann
Thanks for all our friends who have given us suggestions on improving this
article. A modified and some what brief version of this article with exclusive
focus 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
[Return to Top]
What is It All About?
We have developed a powerful multi-dimensional learning approach that
works directly with client issues while allowing reflection, dialogue and
agreement on three levels: Clarifying intentions, agreeing on desired
outcomes and identifying actions that allow us to get to those outcomes.
Thirty organizations including five Fortune 100 companies have used this
methodology successfully in designing strategy, clarify their mission, design
http://mithya.prasadkaipa.com/pyramids/alignmentstrategy.html
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executive development programs in addition to designing books,

management CD-ROMs and five year strategic plans with built-in
assessment 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 you
to examine the model from different perspectives and to understand it
as a system.
2. The process of creating the model is interactive, inclusive and allows
for both head and heart to be deeply involved (the concepts as well as
the energy with which those concepts are presented are important).
3. Reflection and action orientation are both included during the creation
as well as the implementation stages. It is possible to look at the
system, its parts and their interdependencies and relationships
separately and together.
4. The process of creating the model is generative and innovative. The
model, when properly developed, is simple and complex at the same
time. Its simplicity is expressed through its focus on three levels. Its
complexity can be discovered in the generation of individual and
shared meaning from those three levels.
5. The pyramid as a product represents explicit, tacit and unmanifested
(generative) dimensions. Explicit are our intentions, tacit are our
actions and unmanifested are outcomes that we hope to achieve.
In this article, we apply our approach to a specific issue: Bringing
alignment between strategy, processes and people in an
organization. While giving an example of our own, we help you to
understand what our approach is, how you design pyramid tool and
apply it in your situation, and what its potential is.
As with presentation of any new approach, it has applications beyond
what we have envisioned. The purpose of this article is to generate
interest in it and develop further applications in organizations. We
welcome your feedback!
(TOC)
Introduction
Most organizational change efforts have produced, mixed results.
Models, approaches, and concepts that make sense in the beginning
have often not produced desired outcomes. Somehow, the structures
put in place, the strategy that drives the change effort, and the
processes that bring about change leave people drained of energy.
We would like to re-energize this process in a way that will engage
people's vision and passion, and align change strategies with the
processes that fulfill them.
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(TOC)
Achieving Alignment
Aligning an organization's strategy, processes, and people is a
challenge and almost unachievable in most circumstances. When
achieved, alignment greatly improves opportunities for reaching
desired outcomes. This challenge can be met where there is integrity
and 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 we
expected?
Alignment includes learning about self and others through comparing
our perspectives with those of others. It requires unlearning, as well as
learning. And it is a nonstop, dynamic process within organizational
life that must coordinate individual intentions, collective means, and
desired results.
(TOC)
The Pyramid Building Approach
Our approach for aligning strategies, processes and people explicitly
allows organizations to clarify intentions, take actions, and produce
desirable outcomes. It is particularly useful for revealing the
relationships among critical variables and for uncovering the
implications for organizational action and change. It provides a social
context to discover values, assumptions, and beliefs. Groups in thirty
organizations in five countries have used this approach to develop
alignment for a wide variety of purposes. Read an Interview with Tom
Grant about Pyramid Building in the Ford Motor Company.
These have ranged from an executive group of an international
company developing their shared vision, to a start-up group in a
Fortune 100 company creating business strategies to a professional
organization building a framework for exploring their future. In this
article, we describe the Pyramid Building Approach and use a
pyramid we built for our own work as an example.
(TOC)
What is Pyramid Building?
Pyramid Building is a method for identifying critical variables in a
complex system and mapping their relationships and resulting
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interactions. The process relies on brainstorming, dialogue, and

decision-making to build alignment among participants. The product
of this process is a 3-D pyramid with identified intentions, actions, and
outcomes mapped onto the corners, edges, and faces. The pyramid
represents the clarity that has been achieved about the system's
variables and their relationships. The meaning associated with each
of these terms evolves and changes as we experience, learn, and
dialogue. Nevertheless, at any given moment we are prepared to take
action based on our understanding of these terms at that time.
To be precise, we are creating objects geometrically known as
tetrahedrons, a pyramid with a triangular base (see FIGURE 1 below).
Figure 1: A Tetrahedron
A tetrahedral pyramid has four identical triangular faces, unlike an
Egyptian pyramid which has four triangular faces and a rectangular
base. The Egyptian pyramid is symmetrical only when rotated around
a vertical axis. The tetrahedron, by contrast, can be rotated around
any axis and retain its shape. Therefore, any corner can become the
apex. Thus, there is no structural hierarchy in the tetrahedron.
There are key advantages in choosing a tetrahedron over an Egyptian
pyramid as the 3-D object to map our model. Each face of a
tetrahedron connects with the other three faces and each corner
similarly connects with the other three corners. These inclusive
connections are important because they support the notion of
connectedness between all elements of a system. The tetrahedron
permits us to see the interconnection between various system
elements and allows us to model and 'play' with the whole system in a
tangible form. In the following paragraphs, we describe the process of
building a tetrahedral pyramid through an example.
(TOC)
Building the Enterprise Pyramid
The CPR Group comprises three partners. When we explored the
potential of partnership, we knew that we have complimentary skills
and shared interests that would support our working together
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synergisticly, but we needed to clarify how we could align our these in

a way that would include and transcend our individual work and
orientations. Our major professional efforts had been organization
development, researching the nature of learning, and management
consulting, each augmented by a shared interest in self development.
At the core of these disciplines, we identified four importance
processes:
relationship building,
the learning process,
organizing for outcomes,
and changing our perspectives (world-view).
As our conversations progressed, we saw that we have been
exploring different dimensions of development and that we could
identify our intentions as Organization Development, Knowledge
Development, Business Development, and Self Development. These
four intentions represent our individual strengths and commitments,
and together, they represent key aspects of our organization. We
chose those four intentions as "cornerstones" and mapped them onto
a pyramid, which we now designated as our Enterprise Pyramid (see
Figure 2).
Fig. 2: Our intentions formed the cornerstones of our Enterprise

Pyramid
This simple representation suggested some lines of inquiry. Each
cornerstone is connected to the other three, so that each intention is
forced into relation with the others. For example, we began to ask
ourselves:
What is the relationship between business development and
organization development?
How does the combination of business, organization, and
knowledge development best contribute to a change process?
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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 of
intentions led to concepts that 'bridge' the two cornerstones. While the
cornerstones represent our individual intentions, the edges represent
the actions necessary to arrive at collective, shared outcomes. Our
actions 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 development
and knowledge development come together. Knowledge is required
to formulate a strategy for the business development. The process of
identifying strategies, in turn, focuses our efforts in knowledge
development. Strategizing does not have to include organization or
self-development directly and in many organizations it doesn't!
Since edges represent actions, they are often most usefully
represented by action words; gerunds, which form the basis for
assessment or measurement of the strength of the connection (see
Figure 3). Each cornerstone or intention gets defined by three edges
or actions, through which it connects to the other three cornerstones.
We found (with some trial and error) that the actions we identified
fulfilled our intentions very well:
Self Development:
Organization Development:
Business Development:
Knowledge Development:
visioning, creating, realizing

visioning, valuing, learning
valuing, strategizing, realizing
strategizing, learning, creating
In this process of validating intentions and actions, we reaffirmed our

commitment to find outcomes that supported our intentions.
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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 the
meaning of the outcomes produced by the actions of the adjacent
edges and the intentions of the cornerstones. Each pyramid face
represents an outcome 'field' produced by the interaction of three
intentions and three actions. For example, 'Exploration' is the field
that results from the actions of visioning, learning and creating; and
the intentions of Organization Development, Knowledge
Development, 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 of
intentions and actions.
Fig. 4. The Enterprise Pyramid: intentions, actions and outcomes

This tetrahedron represents the holistic development perspective that
we share. Cornerstones represent our intentions, edges the actions
that we could take, and the faces outcomes resulting from our
interactions. Thus, using the pyramid as a model of our collective
interests, we developed a shared view of the system that we
comprise. We found ourselves aligned, not just around components of
the system, but around a growing understanding of the dynamic
relationships among them.
(TOC)
The 'Other' Perspective
Figure 4 nicely represented our intentions and the actions that can
facilitate 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
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going to be before it takes place. Thus, we called this 'The Emergent

Perspective' But what was on the "other" side? We wanted to see
how this perspective relates to our experience with the current reality
of our clients' systems. We called this flip side 'The Foundation
Perspective.'
Let us examine what happens in a business enterprise going through
a change process. When people are not in touch with their dreams
and visions (shared or individual), the context of change can feed
resistance, anxiety and survival behaviors. The organization becomes
uninspiring and people lose their energy and creative capabilities. But
while people take change efforts seriously and try to make them work,
some also find ways to avoid or even sabotage such efforts. While it
is easy to let go of such saboteurs, from their perspective, they may
have a valid reason to do what they do. Assuming that there is
integrity in people's resistance to change, we wanted to learn more
about it. May be the proposed change is too much a break from the
past and may be the organization is better served by focusing on
continuous improvement instead of transformational approach. Thus,
our understanding of the Enterprise would not be complete without
examining 'The Foundation Perspective' as well, and our ability to
produce short-term results. So we set about designing a
complementary 'Foundation Perspective' (see Figure 5).
Fig. 5. The Foundation Perspective of Enterprises

(TOC)
Why Examine the 'Other' Side?
When an organization is running smoothly and not undergoing rapid
change, leaders focus on: Results, Programs, Information, and
Training. They reflect a pragmatic attitude that is intended to sustain
and grow the current organization. This approach focuses on what
works and avoids looking at why it does.
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These four intentions are directly related to those on the Emergent

Perspective: Business Development is about producing sustainable
results. Organization Development has programs but also has an
overall design to it. Knowledge Development is more than just
information acquisition and brings an integrative and interpretive
dimension. Self Development, while providing training, supports
people to take responsibility for themselves and their work!
Results at the Foundation level are pragmatic, e.g., continuous
improvement is intended to solve a problem or meet an immediate
need, and is not involved in a revisioning of the organization. Thus, a
way of thinking about the difference between results in the Emergent
and Foundation Perspectives would be to think of an athlete's
performance. When an athlete conditions and practices, her focus is
on long term gains, developing her skills and stamina over time. While
there may be one major goal, an Olympic Medal or a championship,
there are many challenges along the way. The conditioning and
practice program is geared to meeting each of these challenges with
increasingly effective performance.
During the competition, however, the time for exploration is over. She
needs to respond to whatever comes up during her performance. She
must consider and react to differences in weather, 'field' conditions,
and must challenge her skills and talent. The focus is on immediate
results. This is what the Foundation Perspective offers in
organizations. The pragmatic attitude is vital, for example, if products
are 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 all
actions that support smooth functioning of an organization and support
the pragmatic approach.
The outcomes on the Foundation side of the pyramid are built on its
cornerstones and actions. Negotiation is the process by which we
present information, control the programs and plan for the results.
Intervention takes place when we find a reason to control the
programs we offer and analyze the training so that we can improve the
results. Modification and Solution support imitating, planning, and
presenting to get the desired results.
This Foundation Perspective helped us to see what creates stable
organizations that focus on continuous improvement. They have clear
ground rules and a nurturing (albeit somewhat controlling and more
mechanical) culture. Expectations and/or performance criteria are
known. There is consistency for routine activities. This is the
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Foundation on which emergent perspectives can develop!

Building the Foundation Perspective exposed another criterion for
pyramid development. Not only must cornerstones, edges, and faces
be consistent amongst themselves on one Perspective, but each must
correspond with its counterpart on the opposing Perspective. In this
way two processes are described, the Emergent Perspective's
forward-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 and
Foundation Perspectives build on and support each other, an
organization engages in a learning and developing process. It
becomes sustainable because continuous improvement and
transformation are simultaneously supported (see Figure 6).
Figure 6: Emergent and Foundation cycles

(TOC)
It is possible to look at both perspectives as polarities. When taken to
an extreme, The Emergent perspective reveals self-organizational
characteristics including uncertainty, creativity, generativity, and new
possibilities. Similarly, when the pressure is on, the Foundation
perspective could reveal mechanistic, control-focused routines, rules
and regulations that only support changes around expediency and
refinement. When we look at these two perspectives as contrasting
and complimentary as the two sides of the same coin, the whole
Enterprise Pyramid models an environment of both chaos and
immediacy. In an organization that embraces both perspectives,
change is self-generated and transformational, both practical and
aspiring. Exploring both perspectives and their relationships creates a
developmental approach to organization building and alignment (see
Figure 7). In such organizations, it is possible to look at long term
strategy and be flexible and dynamic while taking short term actions.
Foundation
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Perspective
Emergent Perspective
Training
Self Development
Improving
Analyzing
Imitating
Realizing
Visioning
Creating
Results
Business Development
Planning
Improving
Controlling
Strategizing
Realizing
Valuing
Programs
Organization
Development
Analyzing
Presenting
Controlling
Visioning
Learning
Valuing
Information
Knowledge Development
Imitating
Planning
Presenting
Creating
Strategizing
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 and
values, vision based strategy, creativity, and learning leading to the
realization of enterprise goals. A foundation approach (with intentions
of results, information, programs and training) allows for workable
plans, good market analysis, meaningful presentations, good control
structures and focus on continuous improvement.
Emergent approaches which ignore requirements for short term
gains, structures and systems and only pay attention to creativity,
fluidity, flexibility and individual responsibility can self-destruct. One
company, Virtual Reality Systems, was started with very little seed
capital. In order to secure more, the owner put his patents up as
security. Lenders foreclosed and took the patents. The owner lost out.
More effective attention to the foundation might have saved his
position.
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If there is inadequate attention to the tactical and short term, leaders

can lose support from key stakeholders or simply lose track of the
bottom line. When people stop creating and the market is no longer
enthusiastic about its products and services, an emergent
organization without suitable control mechanisms in place becomes
unable to deal with new market realities and disappears. Our
innovations need the support of our structures. Our structures need to
support our innovations.
On the other hand, the foundation approach based organization has
difficulty adopting to rapid changes in the marketplace. For example,
Diablo printer company was one of the premiere companies
supplying daisy-wheel printers connected to personal computers in
the 1980s. They had excellent quality products, world class
manufacturing facilities and the support of Xerox behind them.
Markets moved on and the laser printers and (later) ink jet printers
took over the market leadership and all their quality did not save them
from extinction.
From this brief analysis we learned that each perspective has to
respect and support the other. Without the support of the one, the
other collapses. When both perspectives are supported in an
organization, it could truly become a learning organization even
though we are still to find one such company in reality. We were quite
pleased that our pyramid building led not only to a organization design
framework but also created shared strategy, processes and, most
importantly, shared meaning with deeper alignment among the three
of us.
(TOC)
How Has the Pyramid Building Approach Influenced Our Own
Work?
The Emergent Perspective is very useful in identifying where
resistance and potential lie for future development. We have learned
to include and transcend self development as an integral part of
business, knowledge and organization development activities.
The Enterprise Pyramid helped us focus our attention on critical
issues. We ask ourselves in engaging with each other and with our
clients, questions about our intentions (Why are we engaged in this
process?), the topics for exploration (Is it necessary to follow this path
or should we approach the problem differently?), the possibilities for
transformation (Does this process include all the parties and
transcend their goals and objectives or is it a stop-gap process to
reduce damage while we find an alternative?) and the means for
diffusion (Did we include suitable communication processes and
structures to let our clients learn and use what they learned with us
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themselves?). We have used the Enterprise Pyramid to help us clarify

our relationships and roles with clients, as well as to explore clientcentered activity. Building this pyramid has helped our collective
enterprise development strategy by including and transcending our
individual approaches in addition to clarifying our individual strengths
and interdependencies. It has helped us clarify our aspirations and
attend to the immediate needs of our association.
(TOC)
Application of This Approach in Other Organizations
In over four years of using this approach in a wide variety of contexts
and for a wide variety of purposes, our clients have found it to be a
stimulus in confronting complexity and integrating diverse
perspectives. In building over fifty pyramids in organizations, we could
see that this approach has much broader application than we
originally intended. We found the Pyramid Building Approach to be
useful in developing shared meaning and alignment. It is also valuable
in helping clients to
think systemically,
explore ideas and build alignment,
surface and explore differences,
communicate and share understanding,
focus efforts,
design strategies, and
evaluate results.
(TOC)
Conclusions
The pyramid building approach provides a fresh way for thinking
about complex systems and for dynamically aligning people,
processes, and strategy for purposeful action. We found that this
approach is very useful in developing agreement and alignment in not
only a three-person team like ours, but also in the complex,
ambiguous, polarized, and high-tension environments found in large
organizations. At the root of this utility is the approaches' potency in
supporting individuals and teams in clarifying their intentions, the
actions necessary for carrying out these intentions, and the outcomes
they wish to achieve.
Clients have reported major benefits in using Pyramid Building. They
have structured their work more effectively, developed strategies,
organized action in a complex context that has become more
understandable to them. Whatever their purpose for using the Pyramid
Building Approach, the end result included clarity of intention, strategy
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for action, and alignment in teams. Learning and discovery become

more lucid. Most importantly, the members of their teams,
organizations, and stakeholders have become more aligned in their
work together.
Organizations need to continue to develop models and methods that
enable them to understand dynamic relationships among complex
sets of variables. Change efforts risk being cosmetic or inadequate
unless organizations are able to account for the complex web of
influences among strategies, processes, and people. The Pyramid
Building Approach (both as a systems model and holistic method)
supports heightened awareness, increased clarity of perspective, and
alignment among organization members in the face of complexity.
[Return to Top]
E-Mail: Prasad Kaipa, prasad@mithya.com, Chris Newham,
crnewham@aol.com, or Russ Volckmann russv@ix.netcom.com
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 develop
client specific pyramids) in our work.
Instructions on creating your own Enterprise Pyramid that is described in
the articles above. (under preparation)
Do you want to know what others think of pyramid building processes and
their applications in organizations? Read the comments from Chaos: A
Newsletter of the Communities of the Future, Fall 1997
You can also download the article, 'The Art of Accomplishment' that
explores 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:
comments@mithya.com
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