Principles
| If you and a partner were each asked independently to split $10,000 between three separate business initiatives, how confident are you that your allocations would coincide?
If your colleagues are in a meeting, without you, would you be comfortable that they would adequately represent your thoughts? If as CEO or founder you know your company representative is with a customer, are you confident that your company is being represented the way you expect? The way you would do so yourself? How would you scale that throughout your enterprise such that everyone would exhibit the same Schelling Point? What does 'SchellingPoint' mean? A Schelling Point is a point - physical or mental - that people will tend to converge on in the absence of communication, because it seems natural, special or relevant to them. The concept was introduced by the American economist and 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize recipient Thomas Schelling in his book "The Strategy of Conflict" (1960). Like-minded individuals easily generate strong Schelling Points around common themes. We have adopted this concept of tacit coordination, or as we refer to it Coordinated Agility™. In Dr. Schelling's own words, "What is necessary is to coordinate predictions, to read the same message in the common situation, to identify the one course of action that their expectations of each other can converge on." If a Schelling Point is that which gives a group of like-minded persons a common purpose, then alignment discussions, collaboration techniques and associated guidance on decision-making cultivates that like-mindedness. Such a focal point is the guide that allows the group of individuals to operate most efficiently while at the same time minimizing the communication burden and management attention often required for "synchronization". From colleagues agreeing on a piece of work to companies forming an alliance, business is about people coming together to design a course of action and putting it into operation. Attaining the best result is dependent upon how well they interact in order to accommodate individual and corporate motivations - for themselves, their colleagues, their company, and their customers. The greatest leverage points in improving the quality of any business collaboration are: |
| Clarity of Destination | We may be able to summarize the projected end result in a few crisp statements - a "fully integrated acquisition", a "valid business strategy", or a "reengineered process" - perhaps with some qualifying sub-text. Although valuable for concise communications, this is one of the greatest flaws in planning group activities - a lack of specificity in defining the outcomes everyone is working to achieve and the consequences they must avoid.
All too often the objectives are general phrases which are hard to disagree with:
The prime reason for declaring the destination is to enable us to make choices along the way and to know when we have arrived. However, it's rare for individuals involved in any collaboration to have the same vision of the stated destination, and they will all bring their own assumptions, concerns and expectations regarding the project - yet unless asked, they are unlikely to share those views, and it will be assumed that they all share a common goal. However, when questioned:
Every single thought drives the behavior of each person involved - yet many are never surfaced. SchellingPoint provides the tools that enable any group to bring clarity to their shared objectives, and to remove the prime flaw in designing and taking effective action together - the unspoken. |
| Degree of Alignment | We are all aware that in business, alignment is critical to success, but it is a somewhat abstract concept which is difficult to comprehend, let alone measure. For this reason, it is usually treated as being binary: "Are you with us, yes or no?" "Are they on board the train, or on the platform?"
But with the destination clearly defined by a list of the intended outcomes, potential barriers to success and other relevant views and opinions, it is unlikely that the degree of alignment across any group of individuals will ever be 100%. So - is it 23%? 54%? 88%? - and what exactly is in the remaining 12% of misalignment? The first quality leak in joint action is in the 'fine print' of the agreed action. The early stages of execution may proceed according to plan, but then cracks begin to appear. As outcomes begin to fall short of expectations, we search for explanations - who was not "bought in"? - who is not committed? - who is not pulling their weight? - and all too often, a great deal of time and money is committed to patching the cracks and controlling the damage once it has occurred. SchellingPoint provides a tool for measuring the degree of alignment before, during, and after any collaborative effort involving two or more individuals - providing a mathematical calculation of their like-mindedness, and highlighting the potential problem areas where their interests diverge. The ability to rapidly pinpoint where individuals do and do not concur on the factors which drive their behavior allows us to maximize effective planning and design of future action. |
| Level of Collaboration | When groups come together around some joint action, the points of agreement, the platitudes, the grand themes are the easy discussions. At the beginning of a collaboration we are either excited or anxious about the journey - we have our own idea of what it means and what it looks like. The view of the current state which brought us together is mostly assumed to be shared and implicit. Any obvious disagreements have been addressed or set aside to be handled later.
What is more difficult, less natural, and less open is any discussion of difference of opinion - the outcome desired by one person which may be unwelcome to another, or the problem areas anticipated by some which might be vehemently denied by others. In many businesses, negative or conflicting opinions often remain unspoken in the face of a 'half-full, not half-empty' culture, where 'team players' are encouraged and 'harmony is valued'. However, it is these unspoken thoughts which drive people's actions. While some managers try, it is not possible to mandate like-mindedness. Few will proactively look for problems at the outset of any initiative, and therefore silence is usually taken to indicate agreement. By the time these unspoken issues reach a point where they need to be dealt with, it's too late to avoid them, and the only available course of action is reactive. People are often in a dilemma - they want to be able to discuss their views - but struggle with how to do so without jeopardizing their reputation or business relationships. SchellingPoint provides the tools which enable all parties in a collaboration to confidently share all of their concerns, requirements, and expectations at the outset, and to jointly design a proactive strategy to incorporate or avoid the issues raised. |
| Quality of Decision-Making | The quality of business decisions is not the result of lengthy discussions of how to form the best strategic scenario, or how to use a data warehouse to maximum effect - but rather the quality of the data on which we base our daily decision-making process. Armed with clarity to the destination, we look for solid criteria to determine the best options to get us there. Regrettably, the data used in forming these decisions has two major issues:
Inaccuracy: Many of our daily decisions regarding how to act - or not to act - are based on inaccurate data. This data always appears logical, rational, obvious, and credible to us - otherwise, we would not use it - but it may nevertheless be flawed in some degree, and the quality of any decision based on it is correspondingly reduced. Incompleteness: Some of the most valuable information available to us is contained in what is not being openly discussed. If the data on which we base our decisions does not include the unshared thoughts, views and opinions which drive people's actions, the outcome will certainly be less than optimal. SchellingPoint provides the means to check the accuracy and completeness of this key data, correct and enhance its validity, thereby providing the basis for improved relationships and well-founded, quality decisions. |