Most architects, me included, are passionate about their work. They follow the state-of-the-art of their profession, they think about refactoring topics to improve the architecture under their responsibility etc. And the point is, they do these without anybody telling them to do so. On the contrary, most architects will negotiate with the management to be able to access more resources on architecture such as books, conferences; or to be able to implement the refactoring ideas. This is a good example of intrinsic motivation.

This context prepares us, the passionate architects, for a mistake: we assume that everybody is passionate about architecture, yet, in fact, people have different sources of motivation. So we do not invest time in aligning with other stakeholders, and we end up with a bad architecture or a failed change initiative.

I see three levels of alignment:

1. Actions: Taking aligned decisions on actions is the easiest and will bring the most concrete and short-term benefits. We agree on what to do next and who should do it. A good meeting with clearly defined actions would generally suffice.
2. Goals: This is roughly about yearly goals, but there can also be shorter-term tactical goals or multi-year strategic goals. All big organizations have some kind of system for defining personal goals, and there is a ton of literature on this topic. The summarized idea IMHO is a trickling down and concretization of goals from the top of the organization to your level. Doing an upfront discussion at the beginning of the year, following them up at milestones, and reviewing them after the year in a retrospective are the traditional best practices to become aligned at the level of goals.
3. Vision: This is not just about where we want to be in 5-10 years. An architecture vision is related to, but different than the vision statement of the organization. It’s derived not only from the organization’s vision, but also from the state-of-the-art of technology and methodology, as well as competitors, and last but not least architect’s taste, inclinations and mindset. For instance, some architects think that embedded systems are a completely different animal than enterprise distributed (nowadays cloud-based) systems, so there is nothing significant one domain can borrow from the other. I think differently, and since this is a matter of taste, aligning at the vision level with an architect with this mindset is not viable for me. But I can, of course, cooperate with such an architect towards a yearly goal. Agreeing on the vision is the most challenging alignment as it includes highly subjective elements, but it will bring the longest-term and most efficient benefits. Telling and listening to success stories and war stories, citing case studies from the industry, explaining your vision tirelessly and persistently, and listening to what kind of vision other people have can move you forward in the endeavor.

One approach to use my time and energy more efficiently is to accept that I cannot align myself with all stakeholders at the level of vision. For some temporary stakeholders such as suppliers of non-critical components, aligning on the actions is good enough. On the other hand, for important stakeholders such as key developers, management or critical customers, aligning on the vision is very beneficial. The more you become aligned on the vision, the less discussions you need to have on goals. Similarly, the more you become aligned on the goals, the more the need for alignment on actions will diminish.

Thinking about these levels of alignment forces me to keep in mind that not everybody shares my passions. Furthermore, it helps me to think about at which level of alignment I am with a specific stakeholder, and at which level I need to be. This gives me the basis to define what kind of alignment activities to initiate.

As a final remark, do remember that alignment should work both ways, it doesn’t only mean people aligning to you. ;-)