I apologize. I’ve been delinquent in posting for the past few weeks. But (like always, right?) I have a very good excuse. I’ve been working non-stop to launch my new consulting firm, Alignment Associates.

Over the last two years, I’ve been thinking deeply about how to best apply my passion and my talents, to have the most impact. Certainly I can have an impact through this blog, and my writing, and through my facilitation work. But as I wrote here about alignment, and distilled some of my thoughts in The P Principles Primer, I had a bit of an epiphany. I realized there’s a huge void in management consulting and leadership development around this topic. And there are millions of real people, leaders and their organizations, struggling every day because of it. I believe the majority of improvement initiatives are focusing on symptoms of poor alignment, instead of addressing the root causes. And I believe this is the primary reason most improvement initiatives don’t yield the sustainable success we need as leaders.

So for the last few months, I’ve been synthesizing my thoughts around this. How could I help organizations overcome these issues? What would the “right” process be? What tools would we need? How would we overcome the limitations of past approaches? How do we make real change happen, and how do we make it sustainable?

This short (4 minute) video applies the P Principles to my own work; it explains Alignment Associates’ Purpose, Passion, and Products in the form of a Vision Story. Once I understood how to tell this story, everything else got much, much clearer, and is happening very fast.

Alignment Associates will focus on services that help organizations build maximum leverage to improve alignment:

• Alignment Blueprints™, to document and clearly communicate an organization’s alignment current state and desired future state, in the context of the P Principles™
• Alignment Assessments, to objectively evaluate an organization’s Alignment Maturity (using our Alignment Maturity Model™) and understand impactful, attainable, step-wise improvements
• Alignment Programs, utilizing empowered teams and facilitated workshops, to identify and plan the highest-leverage improvements, and implement them within the organization
• Alignment Training and Coaching, to help leadership teams grow their understanding of alignment and build their own aligned leadership capabilities

I’m “eating my own dog food” by applying the P Principles framework in designing and developing this business from the ground up. After developing the Vision Story captured in the video, one of the next steps was building my own Alignment Blueprint, to capture all eight dimensions on a single sheet of paper:

Yeah, I know you can’t read the details… I can’t give away ALL my “secrets.” <wink>

I have a 24″x36″ hardcopy of this posted in my office, to help me maintain clarity on everything I do.

It’s taken a ton of focused time and energy to build the tools and methods to do this. They didn’t “just happen.” They represent what I’ve learned and developed working with hundreds of clients, and in my own firms, over the past 30 years. And I’m excited about continuing to learn and develop this body of knowledge and capabilities, as we apply this approach with more clients. I expect to build a team with broad reach to take these services to scale, to help as many organizations as possible develop their “alignment superpowers.”

It’s an exciting time to be focused on organizational alignment. I wake up early every day with an energy level I haven’t felt in years (maybe decades). I know I’m doing deeply important work, that has the power to improve the performance of many organizations, and the lives of millions of workers and leaders. I’d love to help your organization join the alignment revolution.