What do you think of when you hear the word alignment? The wheels on your car? Your body position in a yoga pose? I bet it’s not online education. . . but hear me out.

Because I believe breakthroughs come from cross-pollination among disciplines, I’m going to borrow this concept from Quality Matters— which is a system for evaluating the quality of online courses. In this context, alignment refers to the relationships among course objectives, unit or module objectives, instructional materials, learning activities, and assessments. Are the outcomes measurable and appropriate, at both levels? Are the course components aligned with those outcomes? This sounds basic, but it can be surprisingly challenging to achieve. Mapping out these connections can be difficult– and enlightening. I’ve done it as both a course instructor and a peer reviewer for other courses, and found it enormously valuable.

So let’s distill this idea down to the basic components: set high-level goals, set smaller goals to support the big goals, and choose actions and assessments that align with those goals.

Where else can we use this simple structure to improve things?

• Clinical management. The patient’s “big-picture” goals are surprisingly frequently absent from the conversation. But patient-centered care demands identifying goals for health and for life. A care plan that doesn’t include an assessment of goals is in peril before it even gets off the ground. And I don’t mean goals like “get A1C less than 7%”. I mean goals like “extend my healthy lifespan so that I can travel in retirement”. That might be a radical shift and it might alter management. Or it might mean the same basic management plan is perceived very differently by the patient. I’ve written about the concept of concordance in healthcare before– it’s similar. Aligning our plans to treat, follow-up, and assess our patients with our shared goals, both long-term and more immediate, is crucial to effective care.
• Career trajectories. I recently wrote about the challenges of focus in an academic/clinical career.  What if, instead of a single-minded focus on a narrow area, each opportunity is considered in terms of alignment with “big-picture” goals? This approach allows for more bricolage (which, BTW, can make work relevant and grounded), more cross-pollination, more serendipity, more diversity– without falling into a scattered mess. I have a couple of broad interest areas and goals, and I find that rather than continue to narrow into extreme sub-specialization, I prefer to exist as a practicing member of the communities I’m a part of, and participate in projects that align with those areas.
• Self development. This is what tools like the Passion Planner promote– making big goals, identifying smaller pieces of those goals, and taking steps to move towards them. The act of identifying goals, and identifying small steps, is enormously powerful in making progress. It takes deliberate thought and reflection, but the outcomes of small actions over time that are all aligned with a goal can be mind-blowing.

So there you go. Take a simple principle, and see how powerful it can be in different contexts. Think about how Atul Gawande used a checklist strategy from aviation to improve surgery, and think about what big ideas might disrupt your regular practices.