Align and Conquer 🏹
Divide and conquer is how you break up a big challenge into smaller bits, it's also a great way to self-inflict a lot of damage.
A big part of my role is to keep our company moving effectively in the right direction to make a positive impact (See Rocketeer Promise). That has been such a fun and rewarding journey for me.
I’m a big fan of using phrases, mantras and reminders to capture and align my team. Every now and then, a moment happens that gets me thinking. This is one of them.
Scenario - we’re working on updating each other at a standup and one of my colleagues says “Great, you do Goal A, I’ll do Goal B! Divide and Conquer!”.
And the Theory of Constraints part of my head immediately screamed “WHAT??”.
Instead we can think about “Align and Conquer”, focus on the biggest bottleneck together, ensure we nail it properly and then align on the next. Seems counterintuitive, but it works.
When I think about a lot of behaviors I’ve witnessed in the corporate world, the desire to carve out a clear piece of work and perform in isolation. It feels a bit like self-inflicted “divide and conquer”, which is a great way to fragment your team and your performance.
So true. It's sad to see the divide and conquer approach create the unique solutions that no one is aligned upon which inflicts more delays and disagreement.