How do you know if everyone is pulling in the same direction?

The movie The Boys in the Boat, based on the true story of the University of Washington's rowing team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, tells the story of nine working-class boys from the American West who won a rowing gold medal in the men's eight.

With a shared purpose and everyone pulling in the same direction - literally in this case - those 9 boys achieved things that no one thought were possible. These were boys with no privilege, not trained as athletes, some of whom had never been in a rowing boat. But they won the Olympic Gold Medal.

The same analogy can be applied to projects.

When everyone pulls in the same direction, work gets done quicker.

When everyone pulls in the same direction, waste is reduced.

When everyone pulls in the same direction, roadblocks just get knocked out of the way.

When everyone pulls in the same direction, you achieve outcomes, you have action rather than motion, things no one thought were possible become reality.

But how do you know if everyone is pulling in the same direction?

First, ask the question

A good place to start is to ask. Although everyone knows that they should be pulling in the same direction, so they’re more likely to affirm than what may be happening in reality. So you have to be clever how you ask.

Check if everyone knows what direction they should be pulling in. “What outcomes are we aiming for?” or “What’s the end point that we’re trying to deliver”. The level of variability in the answer will show you how much work you still have to do.

Ask individually rather than collectively. You want the variability of the answer without being influenced by other people.

Second, interrogate the work

Even if people know where they should be heading, it doesn’t mean that they are. It’s no good if the team know the target, but are meandering to if via different routes, if at all. You need to know if the target is a lived-target or a paper-target.

“What are you working on right now? How does that help us achieve our outcome? If we didn’t do this, would it be possible to still achieve our outcome?” For many people the questions are a bit direct and you might get some defensiveness.

But here’s the trick. Whilst everyone thinks their work is valuable, they don’t think the same about everyone else’s work. So change the question. “What work are we doing as a team, or planning to do, where we could still achieve our outcome if we didn’t do it?” The ideas most nominated are your insight.

You can also interrogate the work with Gen AI. I’ve had some surprisingly interesting results with this. Feed it the outcomes, then the work, and ask it to identify if any of the work is not necessary to deliver the outcome. On occasion, this has generated ideas I hadn’t thought about.

Finally, build the traceability

A good outcome is both specific and measurable (and a whole load of other things… but those two will do for now). That should enable you to validate how the work contributes to the outcome. What percentage of the measure we are trying to reach, does the work deliver? Is the work a dependency for something else that contributes to the measure? If it’s not any of these, is it really aligned?

The chances are that there are opportunities in your project for tighter alignment. Particularly if you haven’t done anything to influence alignment any time recently. The advantages of alignment are such that the effort is almost always worth the expense.

I’m not saying that you’re going to win a gold medal - but I do know that the more aligned everyone is, the easier and more successful the project will be.