Is Pathfinding a standard?

Pathfinding is not a standard. It is an intelligent, ever-evolving approach to stakeholder engagement and cooperation. While design and execution standards are important parts of getting meaningful things done – as they provide a necessary baseline of structure, quality, and consistency – we are great believers that “patterns eat standards for breakfast”.

Traditional standards take too long to create and update, and their centralized development processes are insufficient in meeting the diverse requirements of multi-stakeholder complexities. Their disconnect from real-time usage and feedback means there is a significant loss of valuable data and context that could otherwise inform more effective, dynamic, and collaborative workflows. This approach can result in outdated guidelines that fail to address the nuanced and rapidly changing environments organizations operate in today.

Patterns on the other hand offer a more flexible and responsive framework for evolving the quality of our working methods. When properly applied, they can be tailored to fit the specific needs and contexts of different organizations, while maintaining universally applicable performance and quality levels.

The inherent value of Pathfinding is not to provide a fixed, all-encompassing collaboration standard. The world is too complex and too ambiguous for that. We would be constantly playing catch-up.

Instead, Pathfinding’s benefit lies in its ability to provide a minimum set of ‘universal collaboration values’ coupled with a platform that enables practitioners to collectively recognize, adopt, and integrate the critical patterns (signals, pathways, and decision anchors) that emerge from exemplary collaborative practices globally.

Pathfinding is intended to provide a mesh for all current and future ways of working, resulting in true stakeholder interoperability by enabling mass collaboration across different platforms, processes, and organizational structures. This is only possible with a pattern-based approach.

Adopting a pattern-based approach to continuously improve the various dimensions of organizational collaboration can greatly improve our collective consistency, adaptability, and impact:

• ‘Signals’ represent the granular human expressions (thoughts, explanations, and ways of thinking) that are, or may be, relevant to the context of the overall working environment. Collaboratively recognizing signal patterns enables us to better identify and capitalize on emerging trends; surface and respond to underlying issues early; and foster pro-active problem-solving activities.
• ‘Pathways’ represent the interconnected processes and workflows that guide organizational activities and decision-making. Collaboratively recognizing pathway patterns enables us to collate distributed process elements to form natural, scalable organizational sequences (both linear and non-linear) that better match both our unique operational dynamics and broader market contexts.
• ‘Anchors’ represent the values, goals, and boundary conditions that shape our strategic, tactical, and operational decisions. Collaboratively recognizing anchor patterns enables us to better match decision policies with organizational culture in a transparent way, while also providing a compass for aligning commerciality and pragmatism with ethical, societal, and governance considerations.

Tools like the Waypoint software platform and its underlying technical protocol can greatly accelerate the ability to recognize and adopt these patterns by enabling seamless, real-time collective collaboration, as well as the continuous monitoring of collaboration meta-data (including sources and usage contexts), across global networks of teams and organizations. This allows groups to swiftly share effective practices, identify emerging trends, and adjust their workflows based on real-time feedback.