If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
— Anonymous
A single team can move quickly, but to do anything at scale you need a team of teams. Beyond this, you are looking at programmes and portfolios of programmes. That is a lot of coordination!
challenges the assumption that you have to trade off speed to achieve scale. Instead, we advocate a model of autonomy through alignment, where teams are free to make their own decisions within clear parameters.
Alignment
Alignment is the set of guard rails or decision-making principles that mean different actors can make independent choices that they know will be compatible with each other. You can think of alignment like the ‘rules of the road’.
The rules at stop lights, the signage at junctions, the choice of who should yield, are all local conventions that vary between countries. As long as everyone is driving within the rules and guidelines, each driver can do whatever they like. Whether you drive on the right or left is arbitrary, so long as everyone drives on the same side!
Autonomy
Autonomy is the ability of an individual or team to make, and act on, their own decisions, independent of other teams. To do this, they need the skills and capabilities, the tools and resources, and the authority to act. Knowing how to drive a car is useless without having access to a car and fuel, or without a driving licence.
Autonomy through alignment
Autonomy through alignment is the key to consistency at scale. In this model, you centralize policy and federate execution. The alternative is to funnel all decisions through a single authority, typically through a chain of command.
Without alignment, you cannot have genuine autonomy:
- Autonomy without alignment is anarchy
- Alignment without autonomy is autocracy
This is sometimes described as the difference between orchestration and choreography. An orchestra has a conductor who has complete control over what happens, but is a single point of failure. With choreography, anyone who knows the dance can join in whenever they wish. We prefer choreography, it scales better!