Evenn and Venn Diagrams: Beyond the Intersection

Two circles overlap. We can look at what remains on either side, but our attention easily settles on the center: there is what both share. The image lets us recognize a coincidence without losing sight of the fact that two distinct parts still exist.

It is an appealing way to think about an organization. We look for the objective that unites two teams, the customer they both serve, the project that justifies working together. Finding something in common makes it possible to start a conversation that might otherwise stall on what each side wants separately. The agreement matters. The temptation is to treat it as evidence that we have also figured out how to work together.

That distance between sharing something and working together is what interests us about the resemblance between Evenn and Venn. Evenn was not named after Venn diagrams; the association surfaced later. The coincidence gives us a visual starting point for thinking about what happens when two parts find a reason to collaborate and still need to understand each other.

Consider a sales team with the opportunity to close a significant order. The customer needs delivery earlier than usual. For Sales, accepting that date may be the difference between winning the order and losing it. For Operations, meeting it may require shifting deliveries already committed to other customers. Both teams want the company to respond well. The disagreement appears when deciding what responding well means in this situation.

Reminding them that the customer is at the center may help sustain the conversation, but it leaves a difficulty intact: serving the new opportunity affects commitments that also matter. Sales knows how much room there is to negotiate; Operations knows the available capacity and the consequences of changing the delivery sequence. Each side sees something the other needs to weigh.

If we interpret that discrepancy solely as a lack of alignment, we may spend the conversation reaffirming an objective no one was disputing. Meanwhile, the actual question remains open: what promise can be made, and what does fulfilling it require? Finding the intersection is not the same as understanding the relationship.

Of course, there are occasions when recalling the shared objective is enough. Teams may have agreements that work, shared experience, and enough room to handle an order without re-examining their entire way of collaborating. Making every difference explicit also costs time. A simple representation can be exactly what a decision needs.

The difficulty lies in recognizing when it stops being enough. In the order we just imagined, the requested date changes the conditions of the work. The agreement about the customer's importance still holds; what needs attention is how a new promise affects those who must fulfill it. Insisting on what is shared does not answer that question.

Moreover, the differences between the teams are not merely a difficulty to overcome. In this case, they allow the decision to account for both a commercial opportunity and the capacity to deliver on it. If alignment required one team to stop contributing its judgment, the agreement might be reached at the cost of understanding the situation less well.

The same idea applies to collaboration between companies. One may seek in the other expertise or a capability it does not possess. Part of the value of working together depends precisely on each bringing something distinct. The shared purpose gives them a reason to collaborate, but it does not replace what each one knows how to do. Treating their differences solely as alignment failures could weaken the very complementarity that brought them together.

For this reason, we believe an organization should pay more attention to how differences coexist within it, even when there is agreement on direction. A disagreement may reveal a constraint that has not been considered, a commitment someone needs to protect, or an opportunity not yet visible to everyone. Understanding what is at stake makes it possible to distinguish what prevents collaboration from what makes collaboration valuable.

Returning to the two circles, the shared area still matters. Now there is also a reason to look at what remains on each side. If part of what we can achieve together depends on what each side contributes separately, the question expands:

What makes it possible for two different parts to produce something together without ceasing to be different?