Welcome back to Part 2 of my conversation with Sebastian Varela! If you haven't listened to Part 1, I recommend starting there — we set up the core tension between clear, top-down alignment and the flexibility that local teams need to actually get things done.

In Part 2, we dig into the "how." If too much rigidity backfires, how do you know how much flexibility to give? Sebastian's thinking on this has evolved over the years. He used to be more lax about whether teams even needed a shared framework. Now he sees it differently — having that collective vision isn't what restricts flexibility, it's what makes flexibility possible. When everyone understands the "why," you don't have to micromanage the "how."

But here's the thing that really stuck with me: without a shared vision, anything can be a priority. And when anything can be a priority, the loudest voices in the room end up driving decisions. That's not alignment — that's just politics. A clear vision gives you something to point to when you're making hard calls, so decisions are grounded in shared understanding rather than whoever talks the most or pushes the hardest.

Key Takeaways from Part 2:

• Without a shared vision, anything can be a priority — and the loudest voices end up winning
• Frameworks don't have to be restrictive; when everyone understands the vision, teams have the freedom to adapt the "how"
• A clear vision gives you something to anchor decisions to, so you're not just navigating internal politics
• The donor dimension is real — building shared understanding with local teams about constraints is essential, but that understanding has to go both ways

Want to hear how organizations can set themselves up for this kind of clarity? Subscribe to Project Design: The Good, The Bad, and The Wild so you don't miss Part 3, where we get into "designing for the design" — the organizational foundations that need to be in place before any of this works.

In this episode, I sit down with Sebastian Varela to dig into one of the trickiest parts of project design: alignment. Not the "check the box and move on" kind. The kind where you're trying to balance clear communication across stakeholders with the flexibility teams need to actually get things done on the ground.

Sebastian is the Director of Strategy and Institutional Alignment for the Cities Program at the World Resources Institute (WRI), a global think-do-tank focused on environmental work. His team tackles big issues affecting urban centers around the world — public transportation, climate resilience, public spaces, etc., which means a lot of different stakeholders with a lot of different ideas on how to get things done. The best way I can describe what Sebastian does? We once gave him a poster of himself herding cats up a mountain. He is a master at helping people with different viewpoints come together around an idea.

Key Takeaways from Part 1:

• Alignment isn't a one-time exercise. It takes time, is highly subjective and requires repeats depending on the different people that are in the room at different times.
• Top-down alignment can be "very clear, very specific, simple to understand, easy to communicate" — but that clarity often comes from having fewer voices involved
• When alignment is too tightly held, people on the ground will work around it rather than follow it
• The tension between "easy to share" and "works in context" is one of the core challenges of project design

Want to hear how Sebastian navigates this tension in practice? Subscribe to Project Design: The Good, The Bad, and The Wild so you don't miss Part 2, where we get into how organizational vision can help you find the right balance between clarity and flexibility.

In most organizations, you plan first, then build, but what if we plan to build first and design later?

Welcome back to Part 2 of the conversation with Ken Wilkins. In Part 1, we heard how Ken's software team navigated FDA regulations and the tension of needing approval without getting timely feedback. But Part 2 digs into something even more fundamental: what makes a design process actually work?

Ken explains how software's quick prototyping cycles create a unique advantage: you can build something, see how it works, and then loop that learning back to improve your original design. His team transformed a narrow fix-this-one-thing directive into a sustainable framework that would make future work easier. Instead of creating one-off patches, they built a general solution the FDA could approve once and apply to similar problems going forward. But this only worked because they had a project manager who listened when they said "we need to change the scope."

Here's the catch: this kind of bidirectional design process—where what you learn during implementation can actually reshape the design—isn't the norm. In many organizations, whether you're dealing with FDA regulations, donor requirements, or just organizational bureaucracy, the design gets locked in early and you're stuck with it. Ken talks about what he sees as the gold standard: processes that people actually want to follow because they make work easier, not harder.

If you've ever felt like your team is doing good work and then awkwardly jamming it into a process after the fact, or wondered why it's so hard to shift direction even when everyone can see a better path forward, this episode is for you.