Hi codingdave, what feedback would you have? And how would you change our solution?
- 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 engagement, it also can be slower than desired, and does not allow a visionary leader to really drive his organization. It also can make people who truly are experts in a field feel dismissed because now everyone is held on equal footing and their expertise is devalued. At the end of the day, people lower in the org chart will love it, execs will not. And without exec support, it won't become integrated into the org.
Your idea of bringing asynch discussions and decision-making is on-target. But I think you have under-estimated what drives people at different levels of an organization, and this level of transparency and collaboration is not what everyone will want.
In all honesty, I don't know how I would change the solution. I know that you need to continue to feed the ego of leaders and experts, while allowing contributions from everyone else, too. You have to balance different audiences with divergent personalities, and let the leaders lead, without the app feeling like lip service to non-leaders. In short, I don't think your solution is bad - I just think you'll find that it will take a ton of effort, listening, and understanding to be sure all participants truly feel the benefit of the product and there is no way to hit that mark on the first try.
I indeed like to see clean decision-making based on effective patterns. The challenge often comes down to handling people that don't play along. :) Maybe the "clean" solution isn't realistic. Maybe the people are in a hurry. Or don't really pay much attention. If only people would behave themselves! :P
Maybe the usual textbook "decision making process" is only descriptive in the sense that it attaches a label to certain activities. The textbook models often pretend to be linear and unconnected to other simultaneous decisions.
P.S. Agenda-setting as an operational leader is both hard and arguably essential. I distinguish "operational" leadership from "motivational" leadership, conceptually, even though they are often blended into a person or role.