Collaborating on political analysis without flooding your inbox
Political questions don’t care about bureaucratic divisions in an organization. That’s a problem when tracking politics is part of your job.
Let’s say you work at a company that covers issues around the world. You’ve likely hired people with expertise in different regions and assigned them to cover those regions. You have an Asia-Pacific desk, a North America desk, an Africa desk, and so on.
What happens when the question that your clients want you to keep an eye on is US-Chinese competition in Sub-Saharan Africa?
Most likely, it will be the responsibility of everyone and under the ownership of no one.
This can lead to a few major problems.
If three desks have to track a single question/issue/risk, the work is being done three times. Everyone has to read all the news stories, reports, and meeting notes about that issue so they can all be on the same page.
If the three desks don’t all read the same information, then no one has the full picture of what’s happening. It can be easy to misjudge what’s going on on partial information.
Keeping everyone aligned, whether the work is triplicated or delegated, requires an immense amount of information constantly flowing through the office. Every new story has to be emailed around, read, analyzed, and remembered. That may be fine if there’s one major issue dominating everyone’s work. If you’re an organization tracking dozens of issues at any given point, any one bit of analysis is quickly lost down the memory hole of the inbox.
The value of teams
As research from the Good Judgement Project has found, the best predictions are made by teams of people.
https://hbr.org/2016/05/superforecasting-how-to-upgrade-your-companys-judgment
We want people to be analyzing issues together. It gives us a better product and lets us cover cross-cutting topics. I know from my own experience as a North America analyst that when I had to write on US-Japan relations that talking with my East Asia colleague was absolutely necessary. If I had been left to my own devices, the resulting report would have been much weaker.
But we also need to ensure efficiency. If the process of collaboration is everyone sending around the same New York Times links in the company Slack chat all day, we won’t get anything else done.
As teams move to ever more remote work, with less ability to quickly walk across the office to ask a question (as I did for that US-Japan report), efficiency becomes an even greater concern. Every email sent is a minute lost during the day. Every email not sent is a potentially crucial bit of information not shared.
How a monitor can help
This dilemma is at the heart of Two Lanterns as a company. We recognize that when political analysis become part of one’s job, there are two goals: accuracy and efficiency. We want to maximize both and avoid trade-offs.
That is one reason why we placed monitors as a central feature of our platform.
Monitors have a number of benefits in terms of reflecting how we naturally cover politics, forcing analytical rigor, and turning reading the news into analysis.
They also have a huge benefit in helping us collaborate with our colleagues without inundating them with emails.
Setting up a monitor for collaboration
When you sign up for the Two Lanterns platform, you can create an account for your organization and start inviting your colleagues to join. You can also sign up as an individual and invite others who you work with (for example, freelance analysts who often work together on commissions).
Set up a monitor on a question that you’re already tracking. Then go to Edit Monitor, then Manage Permissions, and invite others to join the monitor. Note that organizational monitors will automatically be available to everyone in the organization.
There are two types of access.
Organizations with permission and Users with permission have full access to the monitor. They can edit the descriptions and see all updates.
Contributors have limited access. They can see their own updates and the general description of the monitor, but they can’t edit the overall monitor or see others’ updates.
The contributor limitations are best if you’re building a monitor with sensitive internal information but you want to bring in external expertise.
For example, if you have a monitor about whether a bill will pass a legislature, you may include updates from your lobbyist. You also want a political science professor to add wider context to the monitor but you don’t want the professor to know what your lobbyist is saying. Invite the lobbyist to be a user with permission and the professor to be a contributor and your information is segmented.
Save time with updates
With different people all feeding into one monitor, you now have the ability to jointly track issues without too many emails or too little communication.
Let’s go back to the US-China competition in Africa idea. On the way into work one day, all three analysts are reading the news (let’s hope none are driving).
Each sees a story that matters for this question in their area of expertise. They email the link to updates@twolanterns.co and when they get into work they add some analysis, adjust the score, and connect it to the monitor.
They then check the monitor and see that there are two other updates from their colleagues. Each can be read quickly, with its accompanying analysis, the driver it matters for, and how it changes the overall monitor.
Within just a few minutes, each analyst has taken a news item, communicated it to the others, read the others’ updates, and now has a better view of the issue. The process did not add to their inbox and can be easily found every time they check up on US-China competition in Africa.
By collaborating on a monitor, you can save time and have more insights on an issue. It can help bring to your work more accuracy and efficiency.