The Organizational Strategic Alignment™: 20 Years of Transformation

Dr. Miles Overholt explains the genesis of Strategia Analytics’ Organizational Strategic Alignment™ and why it enables organizations to achieve measurable, ongoing results.

Strategia Analytics’ mission is to help organizations truly transform themselves. How do you do this?

Our first purpose is to help organizations build and sustain healthier environments in which everyone can thrive. Yes, those sound like buzzwords but what we’re trying to do is make organizations healthier in the whole-systems concept of what healthy is. It’s not just about “happy” people. It’s also about operations and manufacturing in a system that works and is aligned with the company’s strategy.

How did you start down this path?

In the middle 1990s, I was in a consulting firm that was expanding from learning and development work to consulting and change transformation. I was looking for a way to think about and measure change, and I wasn’t particularly fond of anything that I came across.

I wanted a tool that would help clients change, no matter what their situation. And I wanted to measure the entire system—that is, operations, HR and the executive level—because you should be able to enter a system at any point and figure out how everything in it is interconnected. Also, I wanted a tool that we could share with people so they could do all this themselves.

“I wanted a tool that we could share with people so they could do all this themselves.”

So I wrote a book about the connections between an employee and an organization—or, in more contemporary terms, the employee experience. I used this framework to create survey questions, and then I tested them, winnowing down to which questions were most valid. In other words, I identified which questions actually measured what we were looking for. It got really fascinating in a hurry.

In 1999, I was at a conference where I met Dr. Al Vicere, a professor from Penn State’s business school. He’d just developed a systems measurement tool that he was using with executive teams. Very quickly, we saw that we were complementary. He was measuring at the very top of the organization—looking at culture, leadership and strategy—where I’d built a systems model that measured operations.

At the same time, I was doing research for SHRM’s HR People & Strategy (formally HRPS). There I worked with Dr. Elena Granell, a leading researcher in the area. She and I ran their annual Global Study on the State of the Art of HR. The focus was on HR’s role on meeting customer needs. We combined Vicere’s questionnaire, my questionnaire and the questionnaire we did for the global study. Over time, the result was a trimmer, slimmer assessment that dealt with customer issues, operating issues and leadership and strategy issues.

We’ve honed that questionnaire over the last 20 years, working with clients, gathering data and running statistical analyses to test for validity. The result is the Organizational Strategic Alignment™ (OSA).

So, your tools are deeply rooted in social science research. Why is that important?

If you’re measuring a system—and that’s a complicated process—you need to provide results that you know are reliable, trustworthy and valid. Executives are going to use your information to make huge decisions. And these decisions impact people’s lives. Think about it. Every day, when you come in to manage people, you’re affecting their lives. If I’m giving you bad information about how to manage, I’m making lives worse, not better. So, my first rule is do no harm. I need to be accurate.

Some might say you’re just another consultant, selling your “system.” How is Strategia different?

First, our approach isn’t one-size-fits-all. All of the big consulting firms, by the nature of their business, have to create methodologies and categorizations that are pretty much generic. We’re just the opposite. We measure you, we don’t categorize you. OSA is a self-awareness tool as opposed to a categorization tool. Because we’re measuring exactly who you are, we’re supporting your way of changing your company, not our way of changing your company. We design customized change and management solutions based on who you are.

“Our approach isn’t one-size-fits-all.”

At every point where you enter a system, the methodology needs to be different. The steps necessary to make a change are based not only on where you entered the system—for instance, operations—but on what the client wants to achieve with the system. You need to understand their perspective and their needs, then support them in achieving their goals.

Could you give an example?

We had a client, a software company, that had business units in different verticals that didn’t talk to each other, were very siloed. To increase growth and profitability, the executive team decided to create a horizontal approach to their business. To turn the whole company toward taking that approach would be a massive thinking process, and they knew it. So we worked with them at a high level to redesign the organization and develop a thinking process that made the transformation simpler.

Then the question was, how do we implement this change? Knowing the culture of the company, we recommended that the leadership engage all employees in the change process. We created a process in which employees in all departments and at all levels, helped redesign the organization to work horizontally. We shared the results of the OSA with everyone and in departmental meetings, asked them to “vote,” using the OSA to design how the new horizontal approach would work in their units.

“We created a process in which employees in all departments and at all levels, helped redesign the organization”

We then had the results of how their organization currently worked and how they “voted” it should work in their horizontal approach. We now had a gap analysis of their current organization and where they needed to go. Then, with our help, the employee teams developed the new infrastructure using the comparative template.

It’s basic, really. Change 101. The best way to change is to get everybody involved. In this particular company, we used the OSA to drive the change—with the employees being the drivers.

“It’s basic, really. Change 101. The best way to change is to get everybody involved. ”