It can be quite the challenge to align your team towards a shared goal. Jamie shares a practical approach to helping your team co-create the shared narrative that will enable them to reach true alignment.

The CEO walks off the stage. They’ve just delivered the vision and strategy for the upcoming year. Everyone in the leadership team took notes. The Q&A was short and superficial. Everyone is good to go.

But a month later, the CEO is confused. Things aren’t unfolding as they expected. The leadership team starts to show resistance to things they already agreed upon. Some things aren’t getting done, whilst other things are being unnecessarily replicated. What happened?

The problem is they were never aligned in the first place.

Alignment is not a download. A fancy slide deck, a one sentence vision statement and a strategy document do not mean alignment. None of those things are wrong, but none of them will lead to alignment.

Alignment is ultimately a process of co-creating a shared narrative.

How Do Teams Align and Co-Create a Shared Narrative?

Think of this shared narrative as the map of a journey they are about to embark on.

The problem a lot of teams have is that each individual’s map looks different:

  • The HRD’s map shows an earthquake representing the shaky foundations of their workforce whose morale has hit an all time low.
  • The CTO shows a direct pathway to a mountain of gold, but also a storm on the horizon, representing the opportunity and threat of AI.
  • The CFO sees a desert ahead, with so much investment into AI recently the finances are running dry.

To complicate things further, there’s tension in the team, reputations at stake, a lack of psychological safety. Rather than admit their lack of alignment, everyone wants to play it safe.

An even deeper problem is all of these maps are stuck in people’s heads and not out there in the real world.

If everyone leaves that strategic planning session with a completely different map, then of course they’re not going to be aligned.

So what do we do?

This is exactly the problem NarraWay was designed to address.

How to Align Your Team: The NarraWay Process

Here’s how it works:

1. Presentation

The Senior Leader still gives their presentation, providing context, outlining the direction and how they see the strategy unfolding. But what happens next is where we build alignment.

2. Individual Mapping

Each individual on the team is given a deck of terrain cards (think mountains, villages, ports etc.) and a map. On their own, they take their understanding of the strategy and physically map it out using the following 3 questions as prompts:

  • Where we are now…
  • What lies in between…
  • Where we’re going.

Each individual takes it in turns to present their map and their answers to those 3 questions. The rest of the team listens and take notes on the areas of alignment and misalignment they see.

3. Team Mapping

This is where the magic happens.

The team starts by sharing out loud those areas of alignment and misalignment.

Then, they build a map together. Taking their time to discuss and agree on which terrain tiles to place where and why, and what their collective answers to those 3 questions are.

Throughout this process stories are shared, questions are raised and eventually a shared understanding is reached.

Ultimately, their individual narratives are surfaced, and they work together to co-create a shared narrative. And by the end of the session, they will leave not just with a strategy document, but with exactly the same story in each individual’s heads.

Try NarraWay to Align Your Team

NarraWay is ideal for teams embarking on a new project, strategy or transformation. If you’d like to learn more about our NarraWay workshop and how to align your team, then reach out to Jamie to schedule a 30 minute consultation.