We Are Human's Alignment Method
How the team behind Kahoot!, working with the investment firm 2050, are building tools to help purpose-driven companies find alignment.
In the second of two parts, Jamie Brooker, co-founder of Kahoot! and We Are Human takes us through the universal tensions that emerge as you’re building and leading high growth impact companies, and how to reframe them into opportunities for long-term success.
In part one, he explained how Kahoot!’s founders ‘led from behind’ and built an empowered team to make learning awesome.
“We are creating methodologies that help build aligned businesses,” says Jamie Brooker, Kahoot!’s product mastermind, now back full time with We Are Human. “An aligned business is one that optimises for both growth AND regenerative impact, by aligning investors’ and entrepreneurs’ interests with those of society and the planet.”
He expands further: “The team doesn't just make short term decisions, but they design for the long term. They imagine what the future will be and use that to plot a journey. They create win-win outcomes for stakeholders from the ecosystem, enabling everyone to ensure the planet and society are factored into the design every step along the way, so we can restore natural resources and social systems.”
Jamie, along with three Kahoot! colleagues - Co-founder Johan Brand, former General Manager Tim Moore and former Board Member Sindre Østgård - is back working as We Are Human, the co-creation collective that incubated one of EdTech’s biggest success stories.
Between them, they have invested in more than 60 startups that are harnessing technology to make a positive impact on education, climate or society, as well as being LPs in numerous impact funds.
When they stepped back from their Kahoot! day jobs, after 6 years at the helm, the team took a similar approach to when they originally founded We Are Human back in 2010.
“We were relearning how the world had changed while we were building Kahoot!, trying to understand how people are building businesses today,” says Jamie.
“We call it ‘Return On Learning’. If we engage in something, whether it's investing in a startup or if we do a project, it's not just about the financial return or building the product. It's also what we get back from it in terms of learning, bettering ourselves and using that to understand new sectors or skills, or develop our own approaches and methods and tools.”
The tool that they are currently developing in collaboration with the French Investment firm 2050 is The Alignment Method. The approach is based on 2050’s experience as the leading regenerative fund and We Are Human’s insights gained from building Kahoot!, working with their startup portfolio and as operators at various larger organisations such as NRK and Unilever.
“We Are Human was founded, and we built Kahoot! on, the principles of human-centred, inclusive and behavioural design,” says Jamie. “Our goal now is to create the next paradigm for how to build companies.”
This is broadening the focus from just the end user. “It’s companies that understand they exist in a broader ecosystem. Who is part of it? How does it affect them? How can we align them all so that they are working towards the same long term incentives and goals whilst meeting their own needs? And explicitly, make sure that having a regenerative impact on the planet and society is a goal of the output.”
The problems with growth
The team believes that, driven by a philosophy of growth above all else, the old world of business has come with a massive cost.
“Companies haven't usually set out to create adverse impact. But there are always unintended consequences about how you design and negative effects to what you're building, whether it's on specific stakeholders, the planet or society. They rarely try to imagine what might happen, or develop strategies upfront to mitigate them”
This has also gone hand-in-hand with purpose driven founders seeking to make a difference commonly having different drivers from those that invest in them.
“You often meet very mission driven founders that have a strong sense of purpose, desire to create a positive impact and a great idea. But they sometimes lack the experience of building businesses and the understanding of how to scale impact sustainably,” he says.
“At some point, they can realise that they're misaligned with the stakeholders around them. Everyone starts out thinking they’re looking at the same thing, but over time the fact that they have different personal realities and dominant logic becomes evident. The founder realises they’re speaking a different language to someone with, say, a finance background. These tensions have compound effects and can even kill the company.”
It’s this problem that We Are Human are setting out to solve. The starting point is understanding the tensions that exist.
1. Identifying tensions
The first part of the method is a diagnostic tool that helps founding and leadership teams identify the tensions and misalignment that are preventing them from focusing on long-term outcomes.
This is ‘the hook’ into the process. It helps the team understand the root causes of the pain points they are feeling right now, as well as understand and empathise with each other. Often an external voice, such as a board member or investor, will take part too.
“It allows them to get things off their chests,” Jamie smiles. “You see this weight lifted off their shoulders. They relax. They realise that others are experiencing the same thing. Or it opens up each other's minds to the fact that they all have different perspectives on things.”
Some of these pains are things they see regularly. “What we’ve spotted from doing this over and over again, is that a lot of the tensions that are experienced are very common,” explains Jamie. “So we've landed upon this burgeoning list of Universal Tensions.”
They have identified seven, although he notes that they are not exhaustive.
1. Growth versus mission alignment
“The first one we've identified is struggling to balance rapid scaling and staying true to the original mission,” he says, noting that the root cause is often investor pressure.
“As a company starts to get traction, the growth is exciting, but it causes all kinds of knock on effects. Lots of people are attracted to what you're doing and the business itself kind of takes on a life of its own. Before you know it, you're having to make tough decisions very quickly. That's what the tensions often are. They are problems that are very short term in their focus. And often the decision about how to resolve the tension is not made with the long term in mind.”
2. Stakeholder expectations versus long term goals
The second is similar to the first, but rather than typically being related to investors, it is also about your customers, employees and the wider community in your value chain.
“As a founder or leader, you need to be aligned with your other leaders. Then you have a team, you have to be aligned with them. Then you have the business itself. And then you have the wider ecosystem. They're all the partners that are involved and have a vested interest in the outcome.” He suggests a way to visualise it. “It's like lots of cogs trying to align constantly. But the aligning cogs are also moving through time, trying to achieve this kind of common goal.”
3. Short term pressures versus long term goals
Following on from this is the external pressure that creates a need for quick wins. “You need successes along the way to keep momentum going. So you're constantly balancing. You need to assess the knock on effects and how that might play out over the long term and make a decision about whether it is worth it.”
4. Resource allocation
“This comes up a lot,” he says, noting how much of a leader's time it can consume. “Deciding what to do with super limited resources, even as you grow. How do you assign effort between growth, impacts, initiatives, operational capacity, etc.? It's an ongoing tension and sometimes you have to make tough decisions.”
5. Innovation versus accessibility
“There's a tension between how accessible innovation can be and how affordable it is to those who need it the most,” he says, noting that most purpose driven leaders are looking at impact. “If you're aiming to transform behaviours, you're often looking at early adopters first. But you still have to question how you make it more accessible over time.”
6. Founder and leadership misalignment
The biggest tension they come across is navigating the divergences in perspectives on the vision, values and operating principles of the leadership team. “It's kind of amazing,” he reflects “They speak to each other every day. But do they really hear each other? Before you know it, a couple of years have gone by, the pathways are diverging, their values have shifted or their idea of what this thing will become is changing. This is extremely common.”
7. Roles, responsibilities and rewards
The last one is about providing clarity of roles and ensuring there is equity. “Has everyone got the right skin in the game? It's not just financial, it also comes back to the emotional connection as well. Does everyone believe this is the right way to build it?,” he says. “Particularly as the company scales. You have to kind of get it right at the beginning because things can unravel really fast. It causes significant friction. If you don't fix it quickly, it can break a company.”
He says that whilst these tensions seem to be fairly universal, everyone will have their own flavour of them.
Synthesis
The next step is for the leadership team to be able to acknowledge these tensions in a way that is unbiased, removing the emotional attachment.
“The way leaders get these tensions off their chest can be very emotional,” he says. “We help them feel listened to, but also remove the emotion so that everyone who's critical to the success is appreciating each other.”
This requires synthesising down the input as everyone will express tensions in different ways. Some will talk about the cause, others the effect. If you can articulate the overarching tension, the cause and the effect together, then generally you can turn a big list into something simpler, that feels actionable to solve where everyone still feels heard.
“Everyone can see their response reflected. But it's using plain matter of fact language,” he says. “You can see them thinking: ‘everyone is feeling the same thing’.”
2. Aligning founders and leaders
The diagnosis is the first part. Then comes various Micro Methods designed to realign the leadership team first.
Their research shows that not only do founders or leadership become misaligned over time without realising it, but also the success of the company is dependent on them each feeling personal ownership in the vision. And that the vision sits comfortably in their broader idea of how their lives will pan out.
The team is asked to articulate what the long-term future looks like, first as individuals:
For them personally: “what does this mean long term for you; How do you see your role in the company changing? How does that affect your career trajectory? What does the future look like in your personal life? What will be your legacy in terms of impact on the planet and society?”
For the team: “what's the culture that's been built? Why are the team motivated to work for your company? Where is the team based? What type of personality or skills do they have?”
The business: “this is a bit more traditional in terms of reputation, growth, customers, impact and the other metrics that you're trying to achieve.”
Governance: “This is super important. Because what we found is with the companies that have become unstuck over time, if the mission isn’t written into the bylaws of the company and the shareholders agreement - and no one is governing it effectively for alignment and they allow their own vested interests to take over.”
The wider ecosystem: “What role does the company play in the wider ecosystem? Who is in the value chain? What is the common goal? Whose behaviour can you influence to change for the better?”
Then they share and discuss their output with each other, looking for where there is alignment and where the differences lie.
The time horizon is left ambiguous because the period that people pick will also help identify where there is - and isn’t - alignment. 10 years is common, but for some this might feel short in terms of the kind of impact they want to have.
Starting with the personal perspective is important. “You'll be amazed how people just don't get the time to think about it or share it.”
The team is also asked to do a 360° Impact Analysis.
“That's where you look at your company in terms of impact,” explains Jamie. “Both now and more importantly, in the future. It allows you to articulate what long term positive impact you’re striving for along a number of planet and society centred dimensions. You might be developing a specific climate technology, but you still have to assess your impact against educational or economic outcomes. You realise that you have a bigger responsibility than you thought. But it's empowering to know.”
Importantly, it also encourages leaders to think about the potential risks and adverse impact too.
“You're trying to imagine what could go wrong, so that when you develop your strategies, you can start to mitigate it. That's where we've seen all these companies with the growth at all costs mindset go wrong. They're not always bad people. They just wanted to create demand. But they've not thought enough about the consequences. If you can imagine it, you can start to preempt it. Then you can mitigate it or limit the impact of it.”
3. Aligning all stakeholders: KAPIs
Then to align all the stakeholders, the board, the team and the wider ecosystem, the next step is to identify some Key Alignment Performance Indicators (or KAPIs) that are constantly being assessed in an iterative manner. The idea is that these can complement traditional measures of business success and can be used to guide the team, board, investors or partners.
“The point of them is that it forces you to think about success along different dimensions,” explains Jamie. “You connect them to the explicit long term goals, the positive impact you’re trying to create and the negative impact you're trying to prevent.”
“You're saying, this is what we want to happen in the long-term and they help create a decision-making framework at every layer of Alignment. This is important because all of a sudden team, impact, ecosystem and governance outcomes are on the same level as traditional KPIs.”
“The relevant ones go to your board, your shareholders and your team to empower them and align their own personal goals with the collective. Companies often make a decision from the business angle and they're not factoring in other angles. But now you have these too, and critical business decisions can be made in the right context for growth and regenerative impact.”
This way he explains, you’ve used the governance structure to bind the board into a more holistic approach.
Summary
As companies evolve, they run into tensions. Many of them are universal but they need to be identified and made explicit in order to begin finding alignment.
This is particularly true for purpose driven startups creating regenerative impact around education, climate change and society, or within legacy companies who are figuring out how to transition to a regenerative future. In both cases, their goals may not obviously align with those of their stakeholders
Over time, these tensions can dramatically impact whether or not the company succeeds. To avoid these problems, you need to:
Identify the tensions that exist. How they impact the short and long term. The underlying causes and effects. Interpersonal, operational, ecosystemic and strategic.
Align the founders and leaders. Unlock personal drivers. Reaffirm the mission and vision. Prioritise impact and profit. Endeavour to prevent adverse impact.
Align all stakeholders. Communicate win/win outcomes in easy to understand formats that are measurable by all stakeholders.
“Alignment always starts in here,” says Jamie, pointing at his chest. “Think about what matters most. Is the thing that you're building and creating, reflecting your DNA, purpose and what you want to achieve? You've got to figure it out, in your heart and in your head. And you’ve got to make sure those people immediately around you are aligned and in sync.”
“Your investors are part of the team. Your shareholders are part of your team. Your board is part of the team. Even your partners and your suppliers or your value chain are part of the team. Treat them in the same way, understand what motivates them and try to align everyone's incentives. And appreciate that it’s an iterative process, you need to keep engaging with it as tensions will keep arising, and the journey to achieving positive outcomes is a long one full of obstacles”
We Are Human and 2050 are still developing the Alignment Method, funded through 2050’s Commons fund, and intend to publish and open source the underlying framework and Methods for the wider ecosystem to benefit from later in the year. To find out more visit WeAreHuman.cc and 2050.do.