The Pattern
THE FOURTEENTH FLOOR, TUESDAY, ONGOING. Concordance, the enterprise certainty platform, announced this morning that doubt has been solved. In a statement, the company described the achievement as “incremental.”
The rollout is limited. Concordance will make the product available first to organizations whose employees have already agreed, a cohort the company calls Tier One. Organizations whose employees have not yet agreed will be onboarded in a later phase, once they have.
“We want to be careful here,” founder Merrick Vance said. “We are not in the business of changing anyone’s mind. That would be manipulation, and we have a whole page about why we don’t do that. We are in the business of finding out what you already believed and returning it to you, correctly formatted.”
The product
Concordance installs as a browser layer. It observes a decision. It does not intervene, and Vance was firm on this point, twice, unprompted.
Approximately four seconds after the decision is made, Concordance supplies the reason.
“That gap is the whole product,” Vance said. “Everybody has the experience of doing something and then being asked why, and having to build the answer live, under pressure, in front of a manager. It is humiliating. It is also unnecessary. The reason exists. It just arrives late. We ship it on time.”
Internal figures put the average unassisted reason at 2.4 seconds of hesitation, three qualifiers, and one visible swallow. Concordance reduces this to zero. The reason arrives already load-bearing.
The company stressed that the reason it supplies is the customer’s own.
“We’re not putting anything in,” Vance said. “We’re just getting there first.”
Pricing
Concordance is priced per seat, per conviction. A standard license covers eleven convictions, which the company says is the average number a working adult uses in a quarter. Additional convictions are available in blocks of five.
Enterprise customers receive Concordance Retroactive, which supplies reasons for decisions made before the contract was signed. The company describes retroactive coverage as “popular.”
There is no free tier. Vance explained that a free tier would attract users who were still deciding, and that Concordance is not built for those users.
What customers are saying
Beth Ordway, VP of Operations at a logistics firm the company declined to name because it does not exist, said the change was immediate.
“Before Concordance, I would make a call and then spend the rest of the meeting assembling why,” she said. “Now I make the call and the why is already there, in my mouth. I don’t know where it came from. I mean that as praise.”
Asked whether she agreed with the reasons Concordance supplies, Ordway said she had not thought to check.
“They’re mine,” she said. “That’s the whole thing. They’re mine.”
The methodology note
Concordance publishes a methodology note with every release, a practice Vance describes as “radical transparency, which we invented.”
The current note runs to a single page. It confirms that Concordance does not read the decision, because the decision is not legible to software. It confirms that Concordance instead reads the four seconds after the decision, which are.
It confirms that the reason Concordance supplies is generated rather than retrieved.
It confirms that in trials, no participant identified a supplied reason as supplied, including the eleven participants who had built the system.
It confirms that when researchers presented participants with the opposite decision and asked them to explain it, Concordance supplied a reason for that too, at the same speed, with the same confidence, and that no participant noticed.
The note describes this last finding as “validation.”
“We were worried the reasons wouldn’t feel like theirs,” Vance said. “They feel like theirs. Several people told us the supplied reason was the first time they had understood themselves. That is when we knew.”
About Concordance
Concordance was founded to reduce friction between what people do and what people can say about what they do. The company holds that this friction is the source of most organizational unhappiness, and that closing it is a kindness.
Concordance has never told a customer what to believe and has no plans to. The company’s position is that this would be unnecessary. By the time a customer reaches Concordance, the belief is already present. Concordance simply removes the interval in which the customer might have looked at it.
The company employs 340 people, none of whom have expressed a reservation.
Concordance is hiring. The application asks one question, and the question is not scored. The company notes that applicants who take longer than four seconds to answer it are not rejected, only recorded.
Concordance does not exist. Neither does Merrick Vance, Beth Ordway, or the fourteenth floor. The gap between a decision and its reason is real, and it is documented in this site’s Register under the ready answer.
