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Make better decisions with fewer online meetings

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Re: Make better decisions with fewer online meetings

#41

Post by l7l »

maliker wrote: post #36

I think you're working on a super important problem. Having moved from a software company to a political organization, this kind of thing drives me crazy. Used to be hey, what's the most critical issue and who's working on it and what's the latest status: oh easy just check the company-wide bug database. Now in a politics org: first track down 15 vague email threads, go to 3 different meetings which are 90% chitchat,…

Hi maliker, thanks for your valuable input. Funnily enough we had political orgs. on our list of early adopters. We specially want to replace that digging through emails to reverse engineer decisions part.

Re: Make better decisions with fewer online meetings

#42

Post by l7l »

codingdave wrote: post #18
bjuly wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi codingdave, what feedback would you have? And how would you change our solution?

- Making a decision at the last 5 minutes of a meeting is fine - if you make it earlier, the meeting was too long. But it has to be the right decision. You don't need to fight meetings - you need to fight bad decisions within meetings. - Getting all the info and feedback and allowing time for all stakeholders to vote can drive a culture of decisions by committee - while this does allow for great collaboration and eng…

Hi codingdave, great input, thanks a lot! We are really early in this journey and excited to learn and put all the pieces together.

Re: Make better decisions with fewer online meetings

#43

Post by l7l »

akrolsmir wrote: post #34

Hey! I like the idea of this a lot; oftentimes in team standups, I feel our discussions would benefit from a clear issue owner, as well as the space for others to give feedback. I might suggest trying other more granular voting systems instead of just up/down voting: 5-star voting, set number of points, or my personal favorite: prediction markets! A prediction market makes participants calibrate how much they believe…

Hi akrolsmir, thanks for your feedback! That's a really interesting concept, thanks for sharing!

Re: Make better decisions with fewer online meetings

#44

Post by tpoacher »

The best meeting tool I've ever seen is the John Cleese video "meetings bloody meetings".

Find a way to include all five summary points at the end of that video into your product, and you'll have a winner.

Right now I see you only addressing one of them, maaaybe two.

Re: Make better decisions with fewer online meetings

#45

Post by l7l »

soco wrote: post #33
l7l wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi soco, great point! We think about encryption a lot as on-prem doesn‘t make too much sense. Would that work for you?

But I would still need to register using my work address - thus sharing it with an external service. That could still be acceptable (depending on contractual guarantees). Your cloud service will then send emails to internal users, thus it's me sharing outside the company the 1. contact addresses (which did or did not agree to above contract) and 2. email contents (up to users what they put inside). Hmm, not ideal. A…

Great points. Didn't know about Teams apps, going to look into it. Cool!

Re: Make better decisions with fewer online meetings

#46

Post by sebhook »

wcarss wrote: post #38

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, whi…

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

Re: Make better decisions with fewer online meetings

#47

Post by jrib »

sankumsek wrote: post #32
jitl wrote: post #27

We’ve found decision logs and our structured “RFC” process quite useful at Notion. The extra structure from a dedicated SaaS for this could be helpful. But to me the Pro/Con voting system seems like it’ll work only for Go/NoGo binary choices. What about selecting the best option from a suite of candidates?

Do you have any details on your decision log? I'm curious what details you add to it. I guess it'd have fields like date, decision made, options considered, and who approved the decision.

I was actually looking for good alternatives today and came across a few good resources:

* https://microsoft.github.io/code-with-engineering-playbook/d...

* https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture-decision...

* https://adr.github.io/

Re: Make better decisions with fewer online meetings

#48

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

wcarss wrote: post #38

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, whi…

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.

Re: Make better decisions with fewer online meetings

#49

Post by awkwardengineer »

highly recommend a few books if you haven't read them yet. plenty of of ideas to steal from there:

from "Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work" https://www.amazon.com/Decisive-Make-Better-Choices-Life/dp/..., you might be presenting a false choice at the top. Is there a feature to prompt people to propose alternative paths?

from "How to Decide" https://www.amazon.com/How-Decide-Simple-Making-Choices/dp/0..., can you add a feature to list options and assign probability and cost weightings? (essentially risk/probability/impact scoring)

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