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by wcarss 1379 days ago
A feature suggestion: a way to list specific possible outcomes, and have pros/cons/questions/votes relate to them.

In the "We will open a new office in Amsterdam" example, it's expressed as just a yes/no situation, but peter@acme.corp is seen asking a question which is really an alternate potential outcome. It seems like a whole separate "decision" would need to be made for that, with its own pros/cons/questions, which would be very clunky compared to having that alternative discussed in the same place.

A different instance of something similar came up for me recently. I lead a small team and a member of the team is temporarily in a far flung timezone. We normally have a team meeting at a specific time which is very inconvenient in this far timezone, but moving to any convenient time would inconvenience the rest of the team. I considered a few options and ran a small poll, proposed a new meeting time for some of the meetings, and everyone on the team hated the idea, so we fell back to having it at its normal time.

I think a tool like this could have been very helpful for listing out 3-4 possible options and allowing people to express specific pros/cons for each of those. We might have ended up at a more optimal situation, but instead we ended up with the one that was simplest to express, discuss, and agree on.

All that said: even with that feature, I am not sure I would pay for this tool. I feel like the friction of introducing "a tool" for things like this, with accounts and signups and seats and process and payments -- it just isn't worth it for the pain it would solve for me. I feel the pain, but I'm not convinced I should pay someone to fix it, or that doing so would really make things better. I also feel (as a shitty developer customer would) that I could build this or something that gets me 60% of the way there for free, or accomplish it via existing mechanisms in slack/the team wiki, where my team already lives.

(but, don't listen to me -- prove me wrong!)

3 comments

Hi wcarss, thanks a lot for your great comment and input! We are already working on alternative decisions, but we need to do lots of improvements to keep it easy. Your willingness to pay sounds reasonable for your use case, we haven't decided on a business model yet. Best wishes
Really, you are talking about CBDM (Consensus-Based Decision-Making). That's something that I actually did a presentation on, years ago (a well-known soporific that puts many to sleep).

I like this idea, and I haven't studied the system enough to know how it works, but it will need to come up with a "framework," where action items are derived from proposals or motions. I guess that using the system would mean agreeing to use their framework. Maybe they can have a menu of different frameworks, but each org would need to adopt a framework.

I agree, this feels like it could be built as a feature of Asana instead of a separate tool.