The Alignment Game

Summary

TLDR; I made a game to align people and priorities in a Google Sheet At work as an “executive” I found myself often focused on issues of “alignment,” especially among the other execs. It just turns out as an organization grows, it operates on fractured sets of implicit assumptions. I found there is often little disagreement on what the problems are, but plenty of disagreement on which were more important. People then carry these differences into decision making without revealing their working assumptions, cascading tradeoffs are made and efforts diverge. There was an incredible sense of clarity when everyone could agree on what’s most important in unison, and I wanted to get there. I started by doing the exercise of stack ranking priorities. Sometimes this would just be finger to the wind thinking about issues, sometimes this would mean months of work to assess impact rigorously. I would challenge others in the company to make their own stack rankings. We’d then discuss the differences and try to converge on a shared ordering. This was an incredibly fruitful exercise that led to great conversations. With more than two people though, as with an exec team, there was a need for more process. It turns out there’s a whole branch of mathematics called voting theory all about how to get a plurality of people to agree on a single thing. The concepts of run-off elections, “I cut, you choose” division algorithms, and how medical schools select students through ranked preferences are all facets of voting theory. In my situation, we had a half dozen stack ranked lists of priorities and we wanted to align people on a single ordering. Turns out, there is no algorithm that always works! You can always find yourself in a situation where more than half of people want A over B, some other half want B over C, and some other half want C over A, so a majority are upset with any outcome. Each ranking algorithm makes certain tradeoffs. Kemeny Ranking The Kemeny-Young method is a ranking a...