SchellingPoint’s research identified previously unseen gaps in group conversation that lead to incomplete discussions and inaccurate solutions.
Few were taught how to determine the inputs needed to create the necessary outputs for a subject, such as:
What items need to be covered beyond the obvious?
What questions need to be asked?
What qualitative and quantitative information should people have before the first meeting?
To solve this problem, we developed Strategic Collaboration Templates to ensure conversation completeness.
Topic Templates are how we accommodate each group’s different subject.
For example, the template for the hospital system redesigning their neuroscience practice differs from the template for the small family business creating their first outsourcing contract.
SchellingPoint Topic Templates provide the themes, questions, participant characteristics, and other content essential to ensuring your group creates the best answer.
SchellingPoint has mapped over 120 common subjects occurring within, between, and across organizations each day. We have digitized them as reusable Topic Templates. For example, a Topic Template, ‘Designing the Acquisition of a Competitor,’ comprises the range of content necessary to provide the discussions with the correct and complete framing for this situation.
The right Topic Template enables your group to collaborate with speed and quality.
A new business need can be triggered at any moment, requiring you to quickly pull a group together, form a set of agreements, goals, and plans, then leave acting as ‘We.’
But where does the agenda come from? What is the difference between “I think that’s what we need to talk about.” and “That is what we need to talk about.”?
SchellingPoint’s research found that groups will cover only 50% to 75% of a topic in their initial conversations. This means that while groups might have a seemingly good conversation at the outset of a new topic and ‘get the ball rolling’, the gaps will appear later as surprises, problems, course reversals, excuses, and imperfect outcomes.
If one of our over 120 pre-defined topic templates does not fit 100%, or cannot easily be adjusted, a Collaboration Architect can configure your custom template to suit your unique topic within 24 hours. Such as when the World Health Organization needed to finally make progress on a neglected tropical disease.
Businesses who conduct the same collaborative activity repeatedly now embed their wisdom, know-how, and knowledge in private templates to rapidly launch these activities with complete and accurate content.
Management consultants addressing the same topic for multiple clients now gather and embed their intellectual property in private templates. In this way, they bring their organization’s full domain expertise to bear on each new project.
Assemble your own Topic Template series as part of your asset-based collaboration strategy.
SchellingPoint also provides templates for public-domain frames, such as those listed below. You should always use such proprietary templates alongside a Pre-Defined, Custom, or Private Topic Template.
Common public-domain templates used for specific organizational topics include:
ADKAR
Balanced Scorecard
BCG Growth-Share Matrix
Business Model Canvas
McKinsey 7s
PESTEL
Porter’s 5 Forces
RAID Analysis
Strategy Canvas
SWOT
Three Disciplines of Market Leadership
Value Chain Management Analysis
Others…