What would a fluid or meta-systematic team coordination app look like?

updated: August 4th, 2018

status: ideation

type: Design Docs

In some ways this thing seems basically like what Intend for teams would already be, since Complice is already designed for fluidity & purpose.

I am kind of imagining calling the app something like Opportune or Opportunastic (ha, that's fun).

There are of course lots of questions to answer about why Asana, Trello, etc are not optimal tools, but I don't actually think I need to start with those! With Complice, I didn't set out to build something that doesn't have the flaws that GTD systems have. I set out to build something that would tackle a much more general question, which just happens to be a different question than GTD is attempting to tackle.

So one level to look at this on is "what question(s) does Liminal Space Agency have that a tool could answer?" (With Complice the question is something like "how can I make consistent progress towards my long-term goals?")

Question/Problem Ideas:

I like the create+notice+leverage concept. All three of those are important, and they get at the importance of information flow. Honestly, if I were to try to build a piece of software to make Liminal Space Agency more effective, I'm not sure that it wouldn't just be an recording management systems. With all of the features I described to Connor Turland.

So then there's a question of "how would such a recording manager fit into a larger context?"

Ah, another thing is "what are we already using and how could it work better?" in the same way that Intend evolved from a goal-tracking system based on P4 & iDT... yeah.

One thought is... in the context of Liminal Space Agency, there are these ongoing threads of people, ecosystems, lenses, projects, etc. And these pop up now and then, and some fall away, etc. If there was a slack integration that listened to all messages and noticed what was being talked about and used that to generate more systems-awareness, that would be cool.

Actually, one thing that would be awesome for Liminal Space Agency is simply a more fluid chat app... which could be similar to the kind of thing I wanted to build on top of twitter (like feedhero). It would be a solution for the phenomenon where we keep making small group chats on slack. Even a better way to manage those would be good.

One workflow-based sort-of-solution in slack would be to use threads for that. So inside some channel, you'd tag the people you want to talk with and then they'd respond in the thread, and that would let other people notice and chime in. But sometimes you don't want other people to see, or moreover you don't want other people to see initially, but you do want them to be able to discover it a bit later, or be added later.

One thing that seemingly very few apps have is... huh, I find myself wanting to describe this in terms of compost or the dissolution part of the panarchy loop. I think this is partially by analogy to what I've been calling staleness. But yeah, in slack, one example of this is that old channels that haven't been used kind of stick around. But also it's really hard to find old group DMs! They do vanish, but in a dysfunctional way.

I find myself thinking that I want a chat app that has a notion not so much of threads, but of conversations. And you can add someone to a conversation in such a way that they can see all the history of it, or you can have them jump in partway through with no context... or maybe partial context, either "last N messages" or "these 3 messages".

Oh man, and if the whole thing were built in relation to something like Conor's Roam, with a bunch of objects, so that you could tag entities explicitly and then on those entities you could see the conversations had about them. Oh, and I was at one point thinking that it could be really valuable to have an app that showed things over the course of time, where things would include people, both what they say and what's said about them, as well as projects, etc.

One important shift that seems to be part of this whole thing is that the app might be much more descriptive than prescriptive. That's part of what I'm trying to get at with the name Opportun-SOMETHING. (Oh man, a name/brand with Porpoise in it somewhere) It's not "what should we do?" but "what could we do?"

Okay, jumping to a totally different level of abstraction. I'm imagining a dashboard page. What does it say, for me, right now?

(after adding the first 3 items, wondering what else there is. defs more... oh! collaborative writing / works-in-progress, which could be handled with gdocs or a simple built-in text-editor for plaintext things)

(and of course all of these things basically would be talkaboutable. so there would be a need for integration between conversations about these things and the things themselves... whether those are chat convos, or also some way to indicate that some recording mentions a thing or represents some movement on it. this is particularly relevant for bigger things like open loops)

(and I imagine that most of the time most of these items would be public within the team, but they could also be more contained, which would be indicated somehow)

...one thing I'm noticing about this though is that it's already pretty complex and it's hard to imagine what the MVS (Minimum Viable System) looks like that could evolve into something more like this. Well, I say hard to imagine, but I haven't actually tried. I think that starting with the recording-mgmt app would actually be decent for being something that you could get everybody using, since Drive is so inadequate that a nearly-pareto improvement wouldn't be hard to make. From there, there's lots of directions to go in.

Huh, I'm noticing that there are actually two systems here that need to evolve in this particular way. One of them is the software system itself, but the other is the system of habits among the user! Ha, that's very important. And I think that part of why Complice's churn rate is higher than it used to be is that the software is brilliantly complex but that can make it harder to evolve a system of habits in relation to it. Hmm... I think there's an opportunity there, for helping encourage people to really focus on building the right habits when they sign up for the app.

Anyway, another potential MVS to start with would actually just be a—huh. A version of Complice that me & Sarah & Jules would actually use during very kairos periods. Which potentially could also involve some linking to what each other is doing, but not necessarily. And this might also require having a native mobile app, since part of the reason it doesn't get used in those periods is that we aren't on our computers. Hm. Plus a way to indicate from phone "do this next time on computer" since there are lots of little simple todos that emerge like that, that take 1-5 minutes on computer but 20+ or are impossible from phone.

I want to really grok what an opportunity-based (rather than todo-based / should-do-based) productivity system looks like, not just on the level of tools/apps, but on the level of thinking. But also, how could it be integrated more with Complice? What about something that lets you pick a particular goal, and then enter "Opportunity Mode" for that goal for a few hours, where you kind of just think of all the things you could set in motion there and start taking action on them, and Complice kind of holds space for you to think about that...

Hm, what even IS an opportunity? To some extent I've been thinking of it as being future-oriented rather than past-oriented, but in some sense it's also present-oriented. Very recent past, and very near future, but with historical context and long-term purpose in mind. It's related to that question

Part of what's messy about this whole thing is that on some level if you're not already making progress or going and doing things, then new things are mostly not obviously emerging as possible. And also it's not necessarily the case that the newest-to-emerge things are best. Although again, if there are (usually implicit) reasons (beyond rebellion) why you've been ignoring your old todos, then that's evidence that something is off about them. But if you put this new opportunity on the list and that happens to it too, then...? Hm.

TODO: talk about desiderata in terms of functions

Further thoughts July 1st, 2020