4Spires—The Vision That Inspires Our Products

4Spires views the work world through a particular lens. All collaborative activity is fundamentally achieved through a dialog between a requester and a performer. These conversations are the critical building blocks organizations rely on to get things done. Like cells in your body, how well they are functioning (i.e. how well they are crafted, nurtured, tracked, and evaluated) defines an organization’s performance.

Work conversations are very often fractured and incomplete. Requests are poorly formed, tasks are assigned without obtaining agreements from performers, deliveries are made haphazardly, and clear customer feedback is extraordinarily rare. The result is inefficiency, missed deadlines, project failures, and low trust. We offer solutions that boost performance by reinforcing a complete, closed-loop conversation in which two parties take action together.

In particular, we seek to reinforce the practices and behaviors for making and keeping commitments. Our central belief is that a rigorous application of this simple principle can transform work related communication and dramatically improve personal and organization performance.

Our Products Reflect The Vision

4Spires offers web software for business that improves accountability, visibility, productivity, and performance. Our solutions support the core component of any collaborative effort, making and keeping commitments.

Collaborative conversations between requesters and performers are the building blocks for managing workflow and executing corporate initiatives. Current tools are not effective for tracking and reporting on these conversations. Requests made through email have no database or workflow structure and status gets lost. Task and project management tools enable assigning of tasks, but there is no required response indicating agreement to perform, nor visibility into the dialog about work-in-progress. 4Spires solutions fill this management and operational gap by combining workflow tracking with threaded dialog.

The software instantiates a closed-loop conversation model and assists users by enforcing and documenting the progress of the agreement from negotiation through to completion. Our products provide generic solutions across many business sectors including project management, case/event management, resolver/escalation roles, call centers, service roles, sales development, marketing/political campaigns, performance management, and more.

Eight Principles That Guide Our Software Designs

1.) We are concerned with conversations that lead to action. We believe that effective and efficient action is spawned in a well-crafted conversation in which two human beings speak to each other, saying specific things, in a structured sequence. The requestor makes a clear request of what would satisfy their concerns, the performer makes an explicit agreement to deliver a specific outcome by a certain time, the performer presents their delivery, and the requestor explicitly acknowledges whether they are satisfied.

2.) We are designing a technology solution that supports human interactions. The users are participants in a “natural” business conversation. We want to support interactions that increase trust and, as a consequence, remove wasted effort.

3.) We provide a collaboration space, a shared space between two people. Different from an email, back and forth, paradigm characterized by communication coming from one person’s space to the other person’s space and back again, our software enables both parties to work in the shared space without waiting for the other to throw the ball back.

4.) The shared space will, of necessity, come with some “rules of engagement”. Both parties need to understand the nature of the conversation they are having and what responses are expected/allowed. Roles need to be clear. Rules must strike a balance and not be too restrictive; the application must be flexible enough to handle the various ways actual conversations are handled.

5.) We provide prompts to move the conversation along, to reach mutual resolution, and to complete it. Open conversations are highlighted. We reinforce the belief that the most effective conversations cover a closed-loop including negotiation, delivery and acknowledgement.

6.) Both parties in the conversation move forward along an explicit path together. Each party can “see” the conversation and determine at a glance “where do we stand?” and “who’s got the ball?”

7.) We are concerned with building trust. Breakdowns should be identified early and dealt with explicitly. The software is acting as a third party to the conversation, watching and helping to facilitate the development of a successful relationship.

8.) The applications are intended to introduce and support new practices, new behaviors, and new ways of working. Beyond capturing data and managing the flow of work, the software represents a significant organization development intervention that leads to improved performance.