The platform is built for consequential, multi-stakeholder decisions - where the cost of getting it wrong could be significant and the people who need to commit to the outcome have different perspectives, priorities, and constraints.
Core Features
The following features operate across the platform.
Workflow-Driven
The software presents each step from start to finish so the Design Guide does the right thing at the right time and in the right way.
Tasks are marked complete and removed as they are performed, with online instruction available for every task.
Personalized
The software learns and recognizes each individual’s thinking on every item throughout the design process. Each person’s inputs are encrypted in the database and visible only to the author with attribution.
Three Collaboration Depths
Restrict the process to a defined group. Allow others to provide input and optionally see work-in-progress. Or allow everyone input into each step and see the results before moving to the next step.
Automation
The software identifies the administrative actions required and performs them. For example, opinions are themed, tagged, and promoted to the appropriate output document when the group concludes each discussion.
Guiding Hand
The software knows what must be done, by whom, and when, and notifies the Design Guide before each due date.
Public/Private Topic Templates
A library of over 140 pre-built templates for common Group Design situations - strategies, policies, project charters, etc. that are personalized to each unique situation.
Users can create private templates for repetitive topics. This allows them to codify their instituional knowledge, wisdom, and know-how for quality, scalable use.
Multilingual
People can participate from any location around the world in their native language.
Real-time, bi-directional translation allows the Design Guide to use their preferred language with a multilingual group, all in the same room or everyone remotely located.
Integrated Email
A secure email server enables all required communications to be managed from the software.
Email Templates
A pre-defined email template exists for every standard communication point with the leader, core team, and participants.
Visibility & Document Control
As the group's content moves from new input to work-in-progress, to approved output, access is configurable.
Privacy and Security
All input is non-attributable. Self-attribution is a choice. Exposure logic prevents triangulation to an individual. All content is stored fully encrypted.
A Modern, Professional User Experience
The software is designed around familiar interaction patterns from modern business software - including drag-and-drop controls, automatic saving, contextual side panels, and clear visual feedback.
The interface is clean, restrained, and straightforward to learn, making it suitable for live use with leaders, customers, and other stakeholders.
The Steps
The following steps can be conducted over a few hours or a few weeks. Each group's topic and needs differ, but the steps remain the same.
1. Scope
A group design of goals and actions is a unique response to a unique set of needs. As with any engineer-to-order product, the process needs to be given a sufficiently complete and accurate description of the situation, the context, and requirements.
2. Pinpoint
The situation's data and opinions need to be collected, from which the subset of which to discuss and in what sequence needs to be determined for the group to be positioned to design the best possible goals and actions.
3. Design
Group-based goals and actions require dialogue, different for different opinions and states. The participants are positioned to have the most effective and efficient dialogue, preventing the negative and fostering the positive aspects of group decision-making dynamics.
4. Correct
During implementation, a group decision's fit, feasibility, and alignment decrease, for at least nine reasons. Periodic drift corrections identify where and why drift has occurred so the group can respond to it.
5. Learn
Each additional Group Design adds to the big data explaining how an organization's personnel convert data and opinions into goals and actions. The resulting Group Design signature can help adapt the process to their needs and identify development priorities.
Scope
> Reduce the time between signal awareness and readiness to respond from days and weeks to hours. > Charter a group with a sufficiently complete and accurate statement of requirements. > Use a universal approach that works for global transformation topics to small team subjects.
The Scope step begins when a leader recognizes a signal and decides—or begins to consider—whether a group-based response is required. The leader may have experienced the positive or negative trigger directly or been informed of it by another party.
The Scope functionality enables the leader, working independently or with others, to describe the signal and the situation it has created. Structured prompts ensure that the essential information is captured, helping the leader examine the situation objectively and in sufficient depth.
Group Design AI analyzes the input and plays the situation description back in a deliberate sequence. Custom validation logic identifies where the information is sufficient, where important gaps remain, and where the description could be improved to produce a valid requirements specification.
Group Design AI then draws on System Dynamics and other relevant disciplines to blueprint the Group Design. It identifies what the design must cover, who should contribute, which data should be gathered, and which opinion prompts should be used.
Within one hour, a leader can have a complete model of the situation and be ready to begin designing the goals and actions for a new shared-response situation.
Pinpoint
> Replace manual, subjective, agenda design with an objective, optimized proposal. > Accept or decline the suggestions, aware of the impact on Fit, Feasibility, and Alignment. > Understand how more or less time, running late and running fast, affect the output.
The agenda defining what a group will discuss and the order of the discussions determines the solution space that their design will fall within. The objective in this step is to ensure that the group is positioned to emerge with the optimal goals and actions - those that are the best balance of Closest Fit, Maximum Feasibility, and Sufficient Alignment.
The Group Design virtual dialogue first provides a safe and secure mechanism for all parties to share their opinions on the topic - the easy to discuss and the undiscussible. At the touch of a button, the Group Design AI explains what the group thinks about their shared topic, their likemindedness, across the strategic to tactical aspects.
The Agenda Designer uses the Group Design frames and proprietary optimization mathematics to recommend which items need to be discussed and in what sequence to produce an optimal design.
Design
> Assemble the best possible goals and actions through a series of micro-agreements that build upon each other into the macro-agreement. > Replace meeting swirl, backtracking, and tangents with focused, reasoned convergence. > Know throughout where the group lands on each point.
Design is where dialogue transforms data and opinions into the best possible goals and actions.
When the first dialogue begins, Scope has positioned the group to answer the right question, and Pinpoint has prepared it to produce the optimal design.
The group uses the appropriate dialogue method for each item, designed and proven to be the most efficient and effective way to converge on the most valuable agreement.
Techniques such as virtual reasoning gathering, a focus on opinion state rather than group alignment, and others, diminish many of the negative behaviors that compromise traditional group decision-making.
An example is Collaborative Design. Groups use this three-step technique to replace flawed two-step problem-solving methods.
Correct
> Drift Correction provides the mechanism for maintaining an optimal design during implementation. > Works as a diagnostic tool where implementation is underperforming, and a foresight and prediction tool to prevent underperformance. > Operates standalone or integrated into emergent (sprint) and deterministic (pre-staged) implementations.
At the moment a strategy, policy, joint venture design, or any other Group Designed set of goals and actions, is moved into implementation, it should be at its peak balance of Fit, Feasibility, and Alignment.
We now know that for at least nine different reasons, that optimal state starts to decline within weeks, sometimes days. As the implementers work, some areas improve, but overall, a net reduction has always been measured.
The antidote is periodic Drift Corrections. For example, every four months during a two-year merger integration - as the topic requires.
Drift Corrections are not implementation performance focused - other implementation governance manage this. Drift Corrections surface internal thinking and likemindedness changes, and external changes impacting Fit, Feasibility, and Alignment.
They rapidly surface the factors that are, or will, cause the implementation actions to underperform.
Learn
> Expand your People Analytics to the mission-critical activity of managerial goal and action design. > Add your organization's Group Design metadata to your private data lake. > Answer important questions, test hypotheses, and surface new insights.
Few organizations have materially improved their Group Design capability in recent years because little GDM-Design innovation has entered practitioner use. Deploying the Optimal GDM framework and software immediately provides a step-up in capability.
As each new situation's response is designed using Optimal GDM, an organization's GDM-Design data expands. Data about how groups use the process, together with the content entered and produced, provides rich insight into how the organization designs goals and actions. Some of the highest-leverage analytics an organization can produce. Supporting the growth and development of leadership and managerial decision design.
Decision process improvement.
Automation, rules-based systems and AI-enhanced workflows are being adopted at the tactical and operational layers.
The best Group Design requires private wisdom, knowledge, nuance, and know-how, processed through convergent, generative dialogue.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
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What does SchellingPoint's software do?
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Can Optimal GDM be used without software?
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Is the software a replacement for training?
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What does the software do that people cannot?
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Do we need to learn Optimal GDM to use the software?
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How is this different from digital whiteboards, canvases and other collaboration tools?
