Coordinating Groups

Coordinating groups is about aligning a group of people around a purpose, a goal, and activity. At the management level, this means coordinating your team. At the leadership level, this means coordinating your organization. Coordination Models are useful frameworks for achieving this alignment.

Schelling Points are options that people naturally converge upon. Since real world projects are not random and indistinguishable, and people are allowed to communicate, picking options is not like the schelling point scenario. However, the model is still worthy of interrogation since these real world complexities still push towards failure patterns of being unable to converge or converging on the wrong option. Alex Komroske¹ discusses some options to improve convergence:

	Pros	Cons
Reduce collaborators	Easier to gain consensus	excludes worthy viewpoints
Reduce options	Less to choose from	excludes possible breakout/creative options
Compelling leader	Easy for group to follow	success hinges on the individual being right
Shared mental models	Decision making flows from way of analyzing decision	difficult to build and disseminate
Convincing argument	Group is swayed by rhetoric and lead toward option	convincing arguments can just be rhetoric and not correct
Response to external threat	Motivating and clear	may be only perceived, and not of highest value
Compelling North Star	Long range strategy to site off of informs decision	needs validity and buy-in
randomness	amongst options that are all to be pursued, pick one randomly at first	any sort of long-term usage of this is not strategic or sane

Splitting your balance point: sometimes a compromise or balance needs to be struck between options. E.g. most users like a simple option, but provide a more complex option for power users.

Aggregate options: Some options are quite similar and so it makes sense to group them rather than trying to pick the best of them.

1. Komoroske, A. On Schelling Points in Organizations. (2021).