We wanted to understand why strategies, programs, and other future-defining goals dependent upon coordinated action so often fall short - and how to improve their chances of success.
We found that many of the most serious implementation problems begin before implementation starts, while goals and actions are being designed. Their flaws remain largely hidden during implementation, or appear as problems incorrectly attributed to root caues.
Most consequential situations require a response that does not yet exist.
A decision is a choice among options. That definition is deeply rooted in academic thinking, management education, and everyday practice. When workable options exist, compare them and choose the best one.
But most strategic challenges, transformations, crises, growth opportunities, and complex organizational problems do not come with ready-to-use options.
This is the null case in decision-making: a response is needed, but no valid options yet exist. The group must design the goals and actions that will become its response.
The best proposal considered may still fall short of the best response possible.
The deep-rooted choice mindset causes most groups to generate several ideas, compare them, and develop the one they judge to be best.
Choosing one proposal shows only that it appears better than the others considered. It does not show that any of those proposals contains the strongest response the group could achieve - or that refining the chosen proposal will produce it.
Each idea reflects only some of the relevant factors. Improving it may make it stronger, while leaving consequential omissions and weaknesses undiscovered.
Our research indicates that this approach causes most groups to produce suboptimal goals and actions: responses that look rational, logical, and compelling while being incomplete or poorly matched to the situation.
False positives. Paper tigers.
The best option approved is not necessarily the best possible response available.
The response must account for the situation’s full reality.
The best possible response lies within the situation itself.
It must account for the underlying causes, desired outcomes, constraints, stakeholders, dependencies, competing and reinforcing motivations, timing, resources, implementation needs, risks, uncertainties, and opportunities. Together, these factors create a very large range of possible solutions.
We proposed a different approach: design the set of goals and actions that best accounts for all the relevant factors.
That response should offer the strongest attainable combination of three essential characteristics.
Fit
The right goals for the situation.
Feasibility
A practical path to achieve them.
Alignment
Enough stakeholder support to move forward.
Conventional methods and concepts do not enable groups to optimize this combination.
Capable groups lose design quality before the first conversation.
Although every situation and group is different, and no two groups follow the same path when designing goals and actions, we found a common underlying process.
Studying it revealed:
recurring quality leaks
occur before the group’s first conversation
In most situations, the optimal design is already outside the group’s field of consideration when conversation starts.
These quality leaks stem from century-old methods that were not intended for this work, missing methods, invalid concepts, and flawed assumptions.
They lead smart, capable groups to create convincing responses that are inaccurate, incomplete, or impractical. Those flaws are then carried into implementation.
Implementation inherits the flaws in the design.
This changes how implementation difficulties can be understood.
Some problems originate in execution. Others appear during implementation but began when the goals and actions were designed. Distinguishing them matters because improving execution cannot, by itself, repair the design.
Committed sponsorship, sufficient resources, capable people, supportive incentives, and disciplined delivery all contribute to success. Their contribution remains constrained by the quality of the goals and actions to which they are applied.
Even perfect execution cannot make an incorrect assumption true, supply an omitted goal, or perform a necessary action that was never identified.
There is a further complication. The corrective response is commonly another group design.
If the group uses the same flawed group design methods to address the implementation problem, it can produce a flawed solution to flaws those methods created in the first place.
Design flaws
Implementation difficulties
Corrective group design
Further flaws if the group design weaknesses persist
Organizational and personal performance depends on a high-quality, repeatable Group Decision Design capability.
An organization's progress occurs through an interconnected, interdependent, cascading network of group decision designs. Goals and actions are created, revised, and coordinated repeatedly as the organization moves forward.
Group Decision Design must therefore be treated as a core capability: a common discipline for producing and maintaining the strongest attainable fit, feasibility, and alignment across those designs.
Until its recurring weaknesses are addressed, each group design will continue to incur avoidable losses even when its other capabilities perform well.
The organization’s capacity to advance depends on the process through which it repeatedly designs what happens next.
SchellingPoint makes that capability practical.
Studying the null case revealed there has never been a universal, publicly available Group Decision Design capability. So we developed one.
It provides a common vocabulary, framework, methods, and measures that leaders and managers can learn and apply wherever groups need to design a shared response.
Because people can overlook steps, apply methods inconsistently, or face limits in what they can process, we built safeguards against the quality leaks into software and AI.
Combined with optimization logic, these tools help groups directly identify the best possible goals and actions within a situation’s full solution space. No options needed.
The framework and software make Group Decision Design a practical management capability that organizations can own, use repeatedly, measure, and improve.
