Thomas Schelling
The Schelling point
Meeting without being able to talk
The Strategy of Conflict, chapter 3
Two people are lost in New York and cannot call each other. This is about why most of them pick the same spot.
What actually happened?
Schelling ran a famous informal experiment. You have to meet someone in New York. Neither of you was told where or when, and you cannot communicate. Where do you go, and at what hour? The answers clustered hard: the information booth at Grand Central, at noon. Nothing makes that place better on any logical test. It wins on prominence, because everybody guesses that everybody else will guess it. Schelling called such places focal points: when people cannot communicate, they converge on the place each expects the other to expect. The force is not in being reasonable. It is in everyone knowing that everyone knows.
Coordination runs on shared prominence, not optimality
When several parties must line up without enough communication, the winner is not the best option but the most visible and the most easily guessed at by everyone else: round numbers, precedent, last time's place, first on the list. Designing a default means looking for the point everyone would blindly point to.
A team across time zones can never compute the slot that suits everyone. Ten on Monday morning is not optimal, and everyone can guess it, so it holds.
Focal points are the hidden floor of a negotiation
Where does haggling actually land? Often on a focal point: split it down the middle, a round price, last year's terms. Once you move off the focal point every particular number needs a reason, and reasons are a new battlefield. Controlling a negotiation is sometimes just placing that point in advance.
The gap between asking a hundred and asking ninety-seven is not three. A hundred needs no explanation; ninety-seven invites why not ninety-five.
A convention is valuable because it is focal
Plenty of conventions are not defensible on their merits, and they are still the point everyone knows everyone knows. Abolish one without supplying a new focal point and what you get is not an improvement, it is dispersal. Have the replacement ready and equally prominent.
Cancel the weekly report with nothing to replace it and information does not move to a better channel. It scatters into private messages.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: several parties have to line up and the cost of talking it all through is too high.
Ask first: what is the natural focal point here, and can the answer I want be placed at it?
Where it goes wrong: insisting on an optimum nobody would ever guess; or abusing focal points to dress an unfair split as the way it has always been done.
Lines to keep
When people cannot communicate, they converge on what each expects the other to expect.
A focal point wins on prominence, not on merit.
Meeting in New York? Most said the information booth at noon.
Same situation, other people are asking
Everyone has a different answer and we cannot get in a room to settle it.Nobody can agree on anything · all 1 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.