After I read Wikipedia’s article on Schelling points (a.k.a. “focal points”), this article made much more sense. I recommend reading it – it’s only three paragraphs at the moment.

In short, a Schelling point is a point that everybody agrees is an “obvious” cutoff point. That knowledge helped me understand this article’s point that Schelling points make good fences to precommit to because you can’t justify moving the fence anywhere else later – the other points are not nearly as “obvious”.