With decades of experience in the business world, in a variety of capacities - CEO, investors, employees and board members - a number of us came together in 2005 looking to address a common issue that we all experienced - that any endeavor, no matter how exciting, depends on people pulling in the same direction to accomplish it most successfully. Our backgrounds in supply chain, technology and process-based industries had led us to conclude that when process is appropriately applied, and technology is leveraged, that order-of-magnitude efficiencies are gained. The “soft area” of collaborative activity had only applied these techniques at a transactional level, but not it would seem at a management nor executive level - where it could benefit from the rigor.

Our Observations

Collectively our experiences surfaced some observations:


• Almost without exception people genuinely want to contribute to group efforts they believe in. With rare exception, given an opportunity, people wish to be part of something where they share a common sense of purpose. 

• That aligning a collection of individuals towards a common purpose, be it a strategy, a project or an idea, may appear easy but is rarely so. The degree of alignment people share is based on a variety of factors - environment, background, experience and trust. And most importantly is dependent on their ability to share their opinions and thoughts effectively.
• That “managing alignment” is something neither taught in business schools, nor supported by process or technology. Current change management techniques may be applied at some individual level, but to successfully achieve a modicum of alignment across individuals that may not even be employed in the same organization - such as a consortium - is extremely rare, and even less frequently turned into effective outcomes. 

• Technology is applied primarily to automate a manual process - and in the alignment arena, the process is "conversation". This has had little or no technology directly applied, in a way that has allowed participants to be more effective and efficient.
• Despite decades of work by individuals like Chris Argyris, the Science of Action had not become a common business tool, a concrete skill to be deployed. Nor has the exemplary work of individuals such as Prof. Thomas Schelling, whose focus on the Theory of Interdependent Decision Making - game theory - translated into any tangible business tools, ironically as it explains much of the behavior we see in any business today when it comes to groups negotiating compromise to achieve joint results.

Our “SchellingPoints”

Given the observations above, what are we of like-mind about?

• That “optimizing alignment” - a key factor to business success - should be made far more repeatable and efficient.
• That the application of process techniques leveraging technology to translate “soft skills” into hard results is woefully absent from this arena. 

• That for organizations, teams, consortia, mergers, etc. to reach their potential this area compels a solution.
• The magnitude of the situation calls for something scalable throughout organizations.

Hence SchellingPoint.