Alignment on the Rocks
"The metaphor of rivers and rocks provides a powerful framework for understanding the interconnected dimensions of life: Customer, Career, Community, and Core. These are the 4 C's of Experience. They are the rivers that shape our lives and work. When these rivers align, they create a powerful current that propels us forward."
- Sean Albertson
Alignment on the Rocks: Reconnect the Work You Do with the Impact You Make, is a great follow up to Sean Albertson’s earlier book I also reviewed, 4Rocks: Reduce Effort, Drive Loyalty, and Transform the Customer Journey. The book provides a set of powerful frameworks to increase the flow of energy along four metaphorical rivers. The first of these rivers is your customer journey. The second is your career, helping realize your organization’s mission, vision, and purpose. The third river is Community, amplifying your own and others’ impact through how you collaborate across the organization and beyond. The fourth is Core, your personal journey to achieve well-being and renew your own flow of energy. Sean shows how these four rivers are interdependent and that by identifying and removing the rocks that shape their direction and currents, you create a renewable source of energy that builds fulfillment, loyalty, opportunity, and wealth (FLOW).
The book resonates with me, given my own interests in culture and leadership. I wrote my own book, The CX & Culture Connection, and launched my podcast by the same name, because I believe that a people-first approach focusing on employee experience and their behaviors is the key to creating a stronger emotional connection with customers. Your employee behaviors deliver peaks along the customer journey directly through how employees show up at moments that matter, as well as indirectly through how they collaborate on the design and continuous improvement of experiences. Leaders increase the flow of energy in their organization through the way they reinforce the CX and culture connection. The mindsets and behaviors of leaders can be proactively cultivated to elevate your leadership experience (LX), which amplifies the ROI for your investments in experience management. I co-authored an article about this several years ago with Sujay Saha called ROX^3: Boosting Returns on Leadership, Customer, and Employee Experience. You can see my podcast with Sujay here.
I’m excited to team with Sean and several other CX experts on the launch of the CX on the Rocks Collective. Together with Jean-Pierre Dumas and Tamar Cohen, I’m moderating a monthly solution series on CX Strategy & Culture. Other CX experts are hosting two additional monthly solution series on Operational Enablement and Technology. You can learn more and sign up at www.cxontherocks.com. These solution series are a great way to collectively make progress on the four journeys discussed in Sean’s book, increasing your alignment and flow.
The book is organized around three frameworks to FIND your rocks, BREAK them, and increase FLOW. Before diving into each of them, Sean first reintroduces the 4Rocks framework for how different types of rocks impact the direction and current of your four metaphorical rivers.
The Four Types of Rocks
A lot of attention is given in experience management to reducing friction along your customer and employee journeys. Sean adds the powerful insight that there are distinct types of rocks that sit in the river, often below the surface, and impact its course and the intensity of its currents. Being able to spot the rocks, understand their impact, and pragmatically remove them, navigate around them, or use them as stepping stones to build capabilities are key to creating alignment and realizing positive change.
Sean’s 4Rocks framework lays out the four types of rocks:
Sedimentary rocks form in layers from accumulated pressure. For organizations, they show up as inefficient processes, silos that disrupt collaboration, and behaviors that impede organizational effectiveness.
Metamorphic rocks are transformed from one type of rock into another under intense pressure and heat. These rocks are harder to change and require careful attention to avoid wasting energy.
Igneus rocks, like lava overflowing, represent unexpected challenges, like service disruptions or reputational risks that demand immediate action.
Meteoric rocks are seismic shifts that disrupt entire industries.
Throughout the book, Sean uses these four rocks to discuss ways to enhance understanding of what impedes each of your four metaphorical rivers’ flow.
FIND your Rocks
The FIND framework stands for Focus, Identify, Navigate, and Define. This framework helps build shared understanding and alignment for your experience design efforts.
Focus is about channeling your energy to what matters most. This could mean picking one of the four rivers (Customer, Career, Community, Core) to focus on first on a personal level or within your organization. It could also mean focusing on a particular portion of the customer journey, or a particular business outcome to improve through your experience design efforts.
Identifying rocks provides clarity on the challenges you are facing and your ability to influence them. Some rocks can be addressed more rapidly through decisive action. Others require sustained leadership focus to remove or wear them down, especially given the need to build habitual behaviors in the organization. Without shared focus and clearly identifying the rocks in your rivers, you will waste a lot of energy and won’t achieve lasting change.
Navigating the rocks is about visualizing the future and charting a course to get there. While some rocks can’t be eliminated, leaders find a way to make them stepping-stones to strengthen their organization’s capabilities and reinforce a stronger culture that’s aligned with their mission, vision, purpose, and values. In every challenge lies an opportunity.
The last step in the framework is defining the specific challenges and actions you can take to address them that will have the greatest and most sustainable impact. This often requires reframing the problem in new ways to increase your focus on a more clearly defined set of business outcomes.
The FIND framework has a lot in common with other Design Thinking tools to build shared understanding and alignment on where to focus to drive change. It provides a useful construct for self-reflection on each of your four metaphorical journeys.
BREAK Your Rocks
The BREAK framework then provides another actionable approach to overcome obstacles. The acronym stands for Blast, Remove, Erode, Accept, and Keep, which are different ways that you can drive change, tailoring your approach to the rocks that impede your flow.
Blasting a rock is best when the rocks are larger, and you want to quickly clear a path through focused leadership attention. For organizations, examples of blasting include product rationalization, fixing a broken process, or divesting a business.
Some rocks are harder to remove and require more extensive planning and leadership attention to mitigate risks. For organizations, this could mean a systematic review of the organizational structure or misaligned operating models that sap organizational energy, lead to poor decisions, and undermine business outcomes.
Some rocks can’t be blasted or removed quickly but can be eroded. Evolving your culture is often more like eroding rocks than blasting or removing them. For individuals, developing new habits requires building new behaviors that displace old, ingrained ones. For organizations, just like for individuals, it’s better to crowd out negative behaviors by focusing on adopting positive ones. You act your way into new mindsets. Sean references James Clear’s excellent book, Atomic Habits, in talking about approaches to habit building. See my book review for Atomic Habits, here. Driving habit building at scale is also a focus for the mastermind group I’m collaborating on with Tamar Cohen, Amplify Your CX and EX Together. You can also find my podcast discussion with Tamar here.
The next step in the BREAK acronym is Acceptance, which is for immovable rocks. For individuals, acceptance means focusing on what you can control. For organizations, acceptance applies for regulatory, economic, and technology shifts to which you need to adapt.
The final part of the framework, keeping a rock, goes beyond acceptance, turning a rock into a stepping-stone for personal or organizational growth. For individuals, keeping a rock is about reframing a challenge as an opportunity for personal growth. For organizations, it involves identifying constraints that, when embraced, can drive innovation and strategic advantage. Capabilities take time to build and overcoming challenges along the journey often makes you stronger.
Increase your FLOW
Culture is about increasing the flow of energy and ideas in your organization. Applying the FIND and BREAK frameworks helps build alignment on how to address rocks that impede your flow.
Sean takes this concept further, laying out four distinct ways that you can drive a virtuous cycle where increased flow provides a renewable source of energy for you personally as well as others in your organization. FLOW stand for Fulfillment, Loyalty, Opportunity, and Wealth. Each of these reinforces your growth flywheel, which is kept spinning through your cultural energy.
People-first organizations boost their energy by tapping into the pride and emotional connection of their employees. Fulfillment, whether personal or professional, is about a deep sense of purpose and satisfaction for your contributions. Organizations with flow have intrinsically motivated employees that buy into their mission, vision, purpose, and values.
Diving deeper into building an emotional connection, Sean focuses on the importance of relationships and trust, which are reinforced through the cultural behaviors of your people. As Sujay and I wrote in our article ROX^3: Boosting Returns on Leadership, Customer, and Employee Experience, .leaders that lead with a higher ground approach foster followership in their teams, while boosting the leadership capacity in their organization (lower and higher ground systems are also often called thinking fast and slow, respectively).
The next building block for FLOW is Opportunity. Sean emphasizes the way leaders help reinforce alignment in their organizations and empower their teams to seize opportunities and be confident to push them forward. For organizations, this means reinforcing a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.
Finally, Wealth is enhanced through focusing not just on what you have, but on reinforcing purpose and progress. Wealth is amplified through an abundance mindset. As Sean so powerfully puts it, FLOW isn’t an endpoint on your journeys, it’s a way of moving along the rivers. Alignment focuses and reduces your effort and boosts your energy.
I greatly enjoyed reviewing Alignment on the Rocks! I hope this review sparked some great ideas for you and energy for you to act on your own journeys. One great way to get started on applying the ideas in the book is to get involved in the CX on the Rocks Collective that Sean has helped launch. We’d be delighted to have you join our regular solution series discussions each month to work through the rocks you are addressing.
If you’d like to dive further into the topic of leadership experience and why it is so critical to reinforce a human-centric approach to AI, check out my recent Substack with Randall Rothenberg on The Craft of Leadership in an AI-Fueled World.
If you’d like to check out my other reviews, you can find them on JourneySpark’s website.